BBC Cymru Wales’ digitisation and external partnership with the National Library of Wales

Abstract

This article sets out the background and approach to the digitisation of BBC Wales’ broadcast archive ahead of relocation to a bespoke new building in Cardiff city centre. The first ‘complete’ BBC archive collection to be digitised, the team had to appraise over 90 years’ of archive content to facilitate digitisation for access purposes to support a full end-to-end production workflow. This took place against a rapidly changing technological background as the industry moved from tape to file-based playout and associated processes, as well as significant operational design changes within the organisation itself. The article describes the challenges faced and some of the decision-making process that took place during both the planning and implementation phases, as well as the establishing of a key partnership with the National Library of Wales to bring into fruition ambitious plans for audience and community engagement with this unique collection of cultural history in Wales, and the implementation of a new digital asset management system to deliver this.