Auntie dusts off more old gems for online archive trial

When the BBC asked for volunteers to take part in a trial of online access to its archive, it was overwhelmed by the response. There were 45,000 applications in two days. Such was the desperation, one BBC executive said, that some over-keen applicants were posing as 61-year-old Welsh grandmothers in the forms to appear to be from rarer demographic groups.

With more than 70 years of broadcasting history, four million items, 600,000 hours of television, 350,000 hours of radio and reams of correspondence and documents suddenly tantalisingly within reach, the BBC could understand a few white lies might be told to gain access.

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The BBC archive is, without doubt, one of the great television libraries of the world. In 2003, Greg Dyke, the former director-general, promised to open it up to the public, saying that the digital revolution had finally made it cost-effective. In true BBC hand-wringing style it has taken four years to begin initial trials of online archive access, and still one major issue has not been resolved – where to draw the line between the expectations of the licence-fee payer and the revenue potential of the archive. After all, BBC Worldwide already does good business by exploiting the back catalogue.

With all the technology in place, 7,000 people were admitted to the closed trial in June and given access to 500 hours of material via the internet. Taking an obviously populist angle, the first tranche of old broadcasts included several Z Cars episodes and the first outing of EastEnders, as well as some crowd-pleasing historical and current affairs clips – a radio broadcast from 1936 announcing King Edward VIII's abdication, and Jeremy Paxman's inquisition of Michael Howard.

The first phase is to test whether triallists would watch whole programmes or just YouTube-length snippets. The second phase, which opened this week with 5,000 places available, is to see how the archive would be used as a research tool. Another 500 hours of TV and radio has been added, all related to the BBC's India & Pakistan season.

Putting the archive online would seem a logical extension to the launch of the BBC iPlayer last month. In development for four years and subject to the rigour of the BBC's Public Value Test, the wizardly little piece of technology has finally been released to the public (though still in beta format) and allows its users to play back programmes from the past week at the push of a button from the corporation's website. The BBC has already been experimenting with putting specific material on to YouTube.

It's no secret that the BBC is working on a big idea about how television will transform over the next decade when it moves away from tapes and analogue signals into what director-general Mark Thompson last month described as: "End-to-end digital workflow – in other words, one seamless, solid-state process from idea and initial capture of material in the field or the studio, all the way through production, post-production, transmission, exploitation and archiving."

The archive is obviously not in neat desktop folders. It had been until recently stacks of film canisters, an assortment of tapes and associated projectors all going out of date. But thanks to a £55m preservation project, which began in 1999, the archive is looking in good nick. Adrian Williams, preservation manager, and his team of around 100 in-house and contracted assistants, have been working through the slow process of transferring material from the 1960s, when two-inch videotapes and Ektachrome film were the norm, into the latest format – digibeta.

Most of the four million items live at the Windmill Road repository in Brentford, west London, with a quick-access library of 150,000 digital tapes held beneath Television Centre for news, frequent repeats and old Wimbledon tapes that need to be found quickly when rain hits play.

Reels that would hold an hour or two of film are being moved on to LTO3 tapes which can store 400 gigabytes of data of a delivery standard for digital, terrestrial and satellite viewing. The preservation team is now working on transferring some of the 340,000 D3 digital cassettes of the 1990s into digibeta formats. Radio has proved a little simpler – a third of the archive is stored on one server, roughly the size of a cupboard, which holds 38 terabytes of information.

Older film canisters from the war years remain untouched unless scheduled for preservation or if requested from the archive for particular reasons, such as the India & Pakistan season.

"The aspiration is moving to a file-based delivery series – a move into servers and networks in the next few years," says Williams. "The idea is an end-to-end digital organisation, though in reality there will still be a lot of tape used."

With the physical archive meticulously preserved, catalogued, and ready for re-use, BBC Future Media is excited about the possibilities for putting it online, building up its educational as well as entertainment value and adding communities around it. But with BBC Worldwide having a similar interest in the archive, though with financial rather than educational aims, Future Media, the organisers of the trial, face a critical question as to where the public rights to the archive begin. With the low cost in distribution technology, BBC Worldwide could argue that even the "long tail" of the archive could generate significant revenue. It has already begun trialling commercial versions of the iPlayer.

Julie Rowbotham, a Future Media executive producer, is aware that the lines between commercial and public are going to be tricky to draw. "In a changing world, you have got to be sure that it's what the audience wants from their licence fee," she says. "You have to weigh up value for money against the costs of digitisation and also of public value. It may turn out that certain parts of the archive that people want are not possible to put up. It's all about making as much open as possible in the right way, without having a negative impact on the market."

The feedback so far on the trial has been positive and from a significant proportion of younger audience. One wrote in to thank the BBC for putting it all online, saying "you might have all been around when it happened but I was minus 7". Others have found routes back to the old John Peel sessions.

Rowbotham and her colleagues have until autumn to collect and analyse their data and present the findings to the BBC Trust, which in turn would decide whether it should face its own Public Value Test. The archive will no doubt throw up as many interesting questions about the identity of the BBC as a commercial entity as a public institution.