See the network in action: for the next six months, online expert Bill Thompson will help the BBC Archive director, Roly Keating, establish the resource as a cultural hub. As a head of partnership development he will focus on building relationships with cultural institutions such as the British Film Institute. He will work with former colleague Tony Ageh, the BBC's controller, archive development, as he announced on his blog:
For the next six months I will be working part-time as head of partnership development for the BBC Archive project, working with Tony and the team under director Roly Keating to build relationships between the BBC and other cultural institutions based around a shared interest in digitisation, standards and practical applications of the enormous archives that form Britain's cultural history.
This appointment underlines the BBC's plans for the digitisation of the archive, after the director of BBC Vision, Jana Bennett, announced last week the launch of an online catalogue of every TV and radio show the corporation has broadcast by Christmas 2010. So indeed, the BBC is putting some effort into its digital archive. Thompson is a "controversialist", but he knows what he is doing.
A well-known internet expert, Thompson joined the Guardian in 1995 and helped make it the first UK national paper with online content. He was asked by Ageh, then head of product development at the Guardian - so history is repeating itself.
"I get to have some influence on what I believe is the most important project the BBC is currently working on, finding a way to take the vast amount of material that the corporation has accumulated over the decades and put it to work in our digital world," he said on his blog.
Thompson will tweet about his work for the BBC archive at a new Twitter profile, bbcbuilt.
