BBC Genome Project

The BBC Genome Project is a digitised searchable database of programme listings from the Radio Times from the first issue in 1923, to 2009.

BBC Genome is not the BBC's first online searchable database; in April 2006 the BBC gave the public access to Infax, the BBC's programme database. Infax contained around 900,000 entries, but not every programme ever broadcast, and it ceased operation in December 2007. The front page of the website is still available to see via the Internet Archive here. After Infax ceased, a message on the website said that it would be incorporating in the information into individual programme pages. In 2012, it was replaced by the database Fabric but this is only for internal use within the BBC.

In December 2012, the BBC completed a digitisation exercise, scanning the listings from Radio Times of all BBC programmes 1923-2009 from an entire run of about 4,500 copies of the magazine. They identified around five million programmes, involving 8.5 million actors, presenters, writers and technical staff. The listings are as published, in advance, and so do not include late changes or cancellations.

The issues were scanned at high resolution, producing TIF images and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was then used to turn the text from the page into searchable text on the Genome database.

BBC Genome was released for public use on 15 October 2014.

The aim of this project is to allow researchers to be able to find out information easier and to help BBC Archives to build up a picture of what exists and what is currently missing from the archive. Corrections to OCR errors and changes to advertised schedules are being crowdsourced, with over 180,000 user generated edits accepted as of January 2017.

Each listing entry has a unique identifier which may be expressed as a URL. For example, the very first screening of Doctor Who is http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/8f81c193ba224e84981f353cae480d49 A broadcast programme may have more than one such identifier, if it was screened (and thus listed) on repeat occasions.

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