4 minute read
Digitising the Summary of World Broadcasts
from BBC MONITOR 30
In 2022, BBC Monitoring and Readex entered into an agreement to digitise BBC Monitoring’s Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB) archive from 1939 to 2001. By digitising this important historical archive, Readex is making previously inaccessible content available for the first time to scholars around the world, Readex’s Jim Draper writes.
The entirety of SWB—nearly three million pages—is being published on a Readex research platform developed for academic users and enhanced with new tools to enable content discovery. When the digitisation is completed (January 2024), more than 70,000 multi-page SWB reports will be accessible.
Long an advocate for the research value of news-type content, we believe that news gives people the power to understand the past, make sense of the present, and plan for the future.
Readex: Bringing history to life
Established in 1950, Readex, a division of NewsBank Inc publishes many of the world’s most widely used collections of digitised research materials.
Researchers know Readex as a leading provider of historical news, government documents, books and pamphlets. To date, we have created 125 historical collections that cover a wide range of places, time periods and topics.
One of our most popular collections is Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 1941-1996 (FBIS), a US archive of open source intelligence (OSINT) containing millions of transcribed radio broadcasts, created by BBC Monitoring’s US partner organization FBIS (now OSE).
Readex digital collections are used in academic, national, public and government libraries in more than 80 countries.
The digitisation process
How do you digitise a physical archive – conserved in paper, microfilm and microfiche – like SWB?
Answer: Step by step by step.
Most of the work is done at our production facility in Chester, Vermont. We employ teams of content editors, subject-matter experts, UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) designers and web developers who work together to build our database collections.
For the SWBs, the Readex team worked closely with the BBC Monitoring and Written Archives teams, first to understand the structure of the documents. The complexity of the SWBs – with formats that evolved constantly –really tested our editorial skills.
Next, we worked with the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham to ship the content to the US so it could be digitised. This was a huge task, and we are grateful for the Centre’s support, particularly from Mark Macey and Hannah Spinks.
With the content safely in Chester, the heavy lifting began:
First, the Readex imaging team created a high-resolution image of every page in SWB.
Next, descriptive metadata was developed (researchers value metadata because it helps them better understand the content they are using, and for SWB we developed more metadata than we had ever done before).
We then enhanced each SWB report with article-level zoning (individual reports are separated into unique documents, each with its own bibliographical record).
The content was then made fulltext searchable using optical character recognition (OCR).
Finally, the content was loaded into the database and mapped to user tools to make it searchable in many ways.
Unlocking history
Readex’s mission is simple: unlock history for scholars and students to enable new discoveries, make connections, illuminate new scholarship, and provide opportunities for new insights and learning.
Readex is especially excited to be the publisher of SWB because SWB is the natural companion to FBIS, which, like SWB, collects transcripts of foreign broadcasts. Our customers think of FBIS as the “American” SWB, and of SWB as the “British” FBIS. Now—for the first time—the two content sets dovetail flawlessly in a single place, each supporting the other to create a more complete whole.
My prediction: In the coming years we will see new discoveries about the 20th century that would be impossible without a digital SWB archive. The discoveries will enlighten us in many areas: international studies, media and journalism studies, military history, propaganda and communications studies, and many more disciplines… still waiting to be “unlocked.”
The newly digitised BBC Monitoring: Summary of World Broadcasts collection is now available from Readex. Readex is grateful to our many new friends at the BBC for making this possible.
