BBC INFORMATION AND ARCHIVES

Restructuring the Business

The BBC is one of the major broadcasters in the world and has one of the largest multimedia libraries. The Sound Archives dating back to the 1920s and the Television Archive dating back to the late 1930s are probably the oldest and largest of their kind in the world. In total, BBC Information and Archives handles 70,000 enquiries and issues over one and a half million items per annum.

THE BUSINESS REQUIREMENT

The BBC Producer Choice system allows production customers to choose how and where to spend their budgets. Information and Archives is run as a business that has to be increasingly responsive to customer needs and aware of technological developments.

THE OLD STRUCTURE

BROADCAST ARCHIVES

Television Archive (Programmes) - Holding a wide range of the output of BBC Television - 540,000 film cans, nearly 586,000 videotapes representing around 220,000 hours of output.

Television Archive (News and World Service News) - A service for News and Current Affairs material dating back to 1948.

Sound Archive - Believed to be the largest archive of its type in the world holding over half a million recordings.

Picture Archives - Consisting of 5 million images in colour and black and white.

MUSIC LIBRARY

Housing comprehensive music reference and research sources on all types of music:

Commercial Recorded Music Library Comprising over 1,250,000 records, discs and tapes representing nearly 3 million performances.

Printed Music Library Holding over 6 million sheet music items with special hire and acquisition arrangements with all major publishers.

DOCUMENT ARCHIVES

Providing a full range of records management services to the BBC from the maintenance of local document management systems in customersê offices to the permanent Written Archives which holds 21,316 linear feet of document records dating back to the very start of the BBC in 1922.

INFORMATION RESEARCH LIBRARY

The library offers a core service based on a large collection of over 150,000 books, access to on line sources and a comprehensive news information service based on 23 million cuttings from newspapers and periodicals.

Pronunciation Unit An advisory service on pronunciation in English and all other languages giving access to over 500,000 names.

THE NEW STRUCTURE - WHY THE CHANGE?

The above structure divided Information and Archives into a series of smaller, separate businesses that were drifting farther apart and lacked the full managerial support and tools that were needed for success. Thus in responding to the new needs of customers, the compartmentalisation and smaller size of the component businesses created real problems. The service was being driven on to the defensive by the decline in business volume.

This trend had to be reversed by creating one whole, integrated business, with the full managerial support required to enable it to go on to the offensive. To be successful it needed to act as one business and take advantage of the overall size.

KEY BENEFITS

• Contributing to the BBC's requirement for savings and to the actions being demanded by customers in consequence.
• Meeting the customers' demand for a one-stop shop or packaged services.
• Getting in shape for customer access to library catalogues and indexes.
• Creating a flexible cost-base.
• Having sufficient whole business managers to tackle the major cost and product issues across the whole I&A business.
• Future and major IT systems may all be cross-product and cross-service therefore management and delivery arrangements must reflect this whole business integration.
• Obtaining major savings in accommodation and storage arrangements.
• Giving the whole service a structure that treats digitisation of the archive as an integrated process, and looks for the most efficient way of accomplishing it.
• To move nearer to empowered, self-managing teams.

THE STRUCTURE

The service itself is provided from cross-service Business Delivery Team, more self-managed empowered. The teams are: Research Services, Cataloguing & indexing, Storage and accommodation, Intake and acquisition.

Other teams will provide services to all their colleagues in Information and Archives, including: Finance, Marketing and sales, Personnel and development, Information systems service, Technical services.

These teams are accountable to a Strategy Team which sets policy and leads developments:

Head of Information and Archives
Business Manager - Responsible for all major business planning and performance monitoring.
Business Process Manager - To oversee all business processes.
Customer Manager - To ensure the creation of new business and the retention of old.
Professional Services Manager - To provide the librarianship and information professional input to all major developments.
Resource Development Manager - To lead all major developments to do with Information and Archives staff.

Information and Archives will remain, we believe, amongst the largest broadcastersê archives in the world. It is, and will remain, a fully trading business that must earn all that it spends. As a consequence we intend to expand our external business greatly.

Gareth Morris
Resources Development Manager,
BBC Information and Archives

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