It is nine years until the BBC's centenary in 2022, the date originally set by its former director of archive content, Roly Keating, for digitising the bulk of the vast archives that date back to the birth of the corporation. Given the gargantuan scale of the task – which includes 1m hours of programming, 10m stills, the world's largest sheet music collection and documentation for every programme – many might have given up. Instead, a determined team has been working on an even more ambitious scheme, the Digital Public Space, to open as much of this material as possible to the public.
The Digital Public Space is not a product or a service, but – possibly explaining its low profile – a more esoteric, visionary plan for the nation's shared cultural history. Conceived by controller of archive development Tony Ageh and Bill Thompson, the archive's head of partnership development, the project centres on a shared technical platform for indexing, searching and publishing material in partnership with other UK cultural organisations.
It's a complex and bewilderingly long-term project, whose challenges include reconciling rights for content owners, resolving legal issues about content use and linking up multiple, incompatible systems, not to mention convincing what is still a broadcast-centric organisation of the importance of its own legacy.
Fortunately for the archive team, incoming BBC director general Lord (Tony) Hall is very likely to be fully archive interoperable himself, having already sat on the advisory board for its first practical incarnation, The Space, in his previous job as Royal Opera House chief executive. Initially launched in May 2012 as a six-month pop-up service and extended until March 2013, The Space knits together BBC technology expertise and content from the corporation, BFI and UK arts bodies with £3.5m in Arts Council commissioning funding. Under the strapline "the arts – live, free and on demand", it has hosted live streams of Shakespeare productions at the Globe Theatre and David Shrigley's opera Pass the Spoon, while interactive ventures include Torsten Lauschmann's Digital Clock and Arena Hotel, pictured right, which reimagined the archive of the BBC's long-running arts documentary strand in the style of New York's Chelsea Hotel.
The triumph, however, was proving not just the concept but the practicalities of the Digital Public Space vision. "The real point of the Digital Public Space is not the archive — it's working together with other organisations," says Thompson, who explained the painstaking technical negotiations behind The Space over linked data and metadata, cataloguing, file formats and streaming that identified and ironed out many of the key principles of collaboration.
There were also varying requirements in calling up and delivering content, from high-resolution images needed by visual arts organisations to the full-length films of the British Film Institute.
"Nothing has been built from scratch, so consequently the back end is not an easy space to use, but the standards are set and are interoperable. We had to be flexible to get it done but we do have high aspirations so moved a little slower than we would have liked. We should be thinking about whether in another 500 years this content will still be available and accessible." By then, Thompson bluntly points out, at least the archive's interminably complicated rights issues will be resolved, as the rights holders will be dead.The archive team is about to embark on its second phase, rolling out joint archive content to further and higher education through a collaboration with Jisc, the newly independent agency supporting digital technology in the sector. A small trial called Chronicle in Northern Ireland last July made 300 hours of local news broadcasts from the 60s and 70s available online to higher education, and proved that the authentication system managed by the British Universities Film & Video Council's online TV and video service, BoB, was robust enough to prevent content being "leaked" and taken outside the education space.
Work started last week at Jisc on the provisionally-titled ReS, or Research and Education Space, which will dramatically scale up delivery to students, researchers and academics across the UK. It is expected to come online in October, with Jisc match funding the BBC at just under £2.9m for three years.
That's big news for the modest seven-person BBC archive team which, Ageh insists, has so far existed without a formal budget of its own, effectively begging and borrowing and maybe stealing from overlapping projects in various departments including Knowledge and Learning, Information and Archives, Research and Development and BBC Wales. (The latter has facilitated a further collaboration which will form part of the ReS project, linking up with the Welsh government's 'Hwb' digital learning platform for 3-19 year olds.)
This scavenging has meant that, at peak, as many as 30 developers and research specialists in separate parts of the BBC have worked short term on specific parts of the project. Ageh and Thompson have been not a little renegade in their approach to the project; despite winning early support from the likes of former director general Mark Thompson, working without a formal budget has meant avoiding the scrutiny and conservatism of senior management. Now the project is established and proven, and Ageh has built internal consensus for the project, it has serious momentum.Keating, who departed for the British Library in May, played a crucial role in legitimising the project, focusing on developing a more tangible commercial product dubbed Project Barcelona that would make archive content permanently accessible, to buy, through an iPlayer-like shopfront with iTunes-like prices. Announced by Thompson in May, there is no set launch date for Barcelona but a BBC spokesman says it is in negotiation with stakeholders and the project is subject to approval from the BBC Trust.
It has already been a long journey for Ageh, who has spent four years on a project that has a wince-inducing nine years, at least, left to go. He has a quiet but ferocious determination. "The BBC is still a corporation in love with television. Even its digital work is centred around programmes and screens, where its core purpose is to deliver its programmes." He describes those with the power at the BBC as the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and preaching in pulpits when moveable type arrived, but failed to see why the public would want to read, let alone create, their own books.
"A BBC producer of 10 years ago would spend six months producing something polished, negotiate a slot for it, get a plug in the Radio Times, wait for the broadcast and the feedback from viewers and the Nancy Banks-Smith review, and then hope for the Bafta. Now all those things happen at once, the moment it is broadcast, and the BBC can't work out how to conflate all that. But the public is in touch with all of that – that the story keeps being retold."
Ageh won't say where the archive will focus next, but encouraging content to be chopped up, shared, reused, distributed and reinvented online is central. This is content that is part of the national story, he says, and deserves to be in the public domain. He has established five principles to underpin the Digital Public Space: the permanence of material once it is made available; detailed metadata for every object; free access; open technical standards; and always managing user data in a trustworthy way.
He is enthusiastic about Hall, who oversaw the launch of BBC News Online before leaving the BBC in 2001. Following the departure of Thompson, Keating and chief operating officer Caroline Thomson – all of whom supported the Digital Public Space ambition – having the backing of Hall and creative director Alan Yentob, an enthusiastic fellow-member of the The Space board, will be crucial.
The real opportunity of the Digital Public Space goes far beyond the BBC's archive and technical infrastructure. It is a vision that should shape the future of the BBC, redefining the kind of organisation it needs to be in a truly internet age. Once Hall has resolved the most pressing challenges in his inbox, there's the small matter of the future to attend to.
