Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal December 2007 Volume 5(6)

Buildings and design

Working on air

Kirsty Crawford describes how the new BBC Scotland building has placed library services (now the Media Management Department) at the heart of the production process.

BBC Scotland’s new headquarters officially opened on 20 September. The building was described by the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, as “not just the most advanced broadcast centre we (the BBC) have anywhere, but one of the most advanced in the world”.

The vision for the building was to create great spaces for people to work in, make it open and accessible for our audiences, and it had to deliver end to end digital production.

And it is a great space to work in. It is light, bright, spacious, open and accessible. What looks like a square glass box from the outside reveals a giant red sandstone ‘street’ or staircase moving up through the centre of the building. This has been described by an architectural commentator as looking like a Tuscan hillside, and by a colleague as a Mayan temple. Each landing has space for meetings and casual seating, and has the technology available to record a radio or television programme. These public spaces are well used, as no-one has an office any more, not the Controller, the Chief Operating Officer, or any of the Heads of Department.

The reception area is open to the public – there’s an exhibition of television through the ages, you can experience High Definition TV in one of the ‘digital cinemas’, there are listening pods, and you can buy a coffee. Our audiences can now interact with us in a way impossible at Queen Margaret Drive.
In terms of end-to-end digital production, our new building was not only a move from the West End to the South Side of Glasgow, it was also a move away from an analogue, tape-based way of working, to a tapeless, file-based environment. This presented the library with a number of challenges: how to keep track of material in a content production system which would be ingesting many hours worth of material a week; how to store material often required urgently for news, sport, and general TV; how to facilitate delivery of content to all platforms – TV, Radio and online; and how to archive this material for future re-use, re-broadcast, and re-versioning.

We took it as an opportunity to position ourselves at the heart of the production process, instead of at the end of it. It was an opportunity to restructure the Information and Archives Department into the Media Management Department. It was an opportunity to build a digital library on a large scale, where users would be able to see their TV content, and be able to listen to their radio content on their desktop. They’d be able to clip out the bits they want, and send it back to their content production systems in radio, tv and online. All our users (around 1,500 in Scotland) should be able to search the library from their desktop, incorporating the old text-based catalogues so they only search in one place, not several.

It did seem simple, but there were a lot of challenges. Firstly there weren’t many media asset management systems out there. A few claimed to be, but in terms of full library functionality it really came down to only one. Then there were all the different systems it had to interface with: the text catalogue, the television content production system, the radio content production system, the news scripting system, the television playout system, and the storage solution.

We’ve had to make many compromises along the way. But we finally have a digital library. It is accessible to everyone in Pacific Quay on their desktops. Users can carry out their own searches, and can see the footage and hear the audio without having to order tapes, find a viewing or listening machine, and spool through hours of footage or radio to find what they want.

It is revolutionary. BBC Scotland is the first in the world to do this on such a scale, and we’ve had all the teething problems of being the first, but we’re getting there.

And what happened to all our tapes? Well we have a huge new vault in the centre of the building that not only holds our legacy archive, but will also hold the tape back ups for all our newly completed programmes. It is four times the size of the storage we had in the old building, and has gleaming glass panels which make a dull vault look like it belongs in this modern broadcast building.

Unfortunately we don’t have the budget to go back and retrospectively digitise all these tapes, not to mention the 10,000 film cans we hold in storage, and the 75 years of radio archives. We couldn’t afford the storage even if we did, but over time we will build up an incredible digital repository of content from BBC Scotland that will be available to all users across Scotland, and hopefully beyond.

The new building and its new opportunities have given us the chance to be at the heart of the production process, work in a spectacular building, and connect with our audiences like never before.

Kirsty Crawford is Resources and Operations Manager, Media Management Scotland, BBC.

Information Scotland Vol. 5(6) December 2007

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