Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Media libraries in the 21st century
- 2 The virtual media library (I): managing intranets
- 3 Picture libraries and librarianship
- 4 Cataloguing television programmes
- 5 The virtual media library (II): managing online subscriptions
- 6 Legal issues for news databases and archives
- 7 The regional news librarian: a survivor's guide
- 8 Swimming upstream in a media library
- Index
4 - Cataloguing television programmes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Media libraries in the 21st century
- 2 The virtual media library (I): managing intranets
- 3 Picture libraries and librarianship
- 4 Cataloguing television programmes
- 5 The virtual media library (II): managing online subscriptions
- 6 Legal issues for news databases and archives
- 7 The regional news librarian: a survivor's guide
- 8 Swimming upstream in a media library
- Index
Summary
Television and radio programmes are catalogued for two reasons. First, a broadcasting organization or authority may wish to keep a record of the title, date and time a programme was transmitted. Second, anyone wanting to reuse transmitted or recorded material needs to be able to find it. For most of the history of television cataloguing, the cataloguing record has also stood as a surrogate for the programme itself, so that researchers know as much as possible about the footage they are seeking before they enter the time-consuming, and often costly, process of ordering and viewing a tape or can of film. Some television companies now archive their output as server files which can be viewed online by researchers. They are a tiny, but growing, percentage of the world's holdings of television output. However, for a researcher to locate the right bit of footage (an anachronistic term that will be used in this chapter about all moving images, no matter what format they are held in), this real media still needs to be described in words, meaning that cataloguing records are still necessary.
The bulk of this chapter will examine how the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation, the UK's national broadcaster) catalogues its holdings of television output, one of the largest collections in existence belonging to a working broadcaster. The author, who has worked for BBC Information & Archives since 1988, primarily in its Television Archive, will examine the problems encountered and compromises made in attempting to make hundreds of thousands of hours of broadcast footage searchable and findable. In an afterword, the editor will contrast her experiences cataloguing using an online media asset management system for an independent news producer, and the changes which ensued to their cataloguing technique after its introduction. Finally, she will mention the latest developments in automated cataloguing.
Introduction
The BBC's television cataloguing department is a small unit, part of the much larger Information & Archives (I&A) area covering many different research and archive holdings and services. It consists of a team of cataloguers providing a record of television output readily accessible to researchers by name, reporter, genre and subject. Members of the team catalogue using an online system called INFAX.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Handbook for Media Librarians , pp. 63 - 78Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2008