"analyse the magazine formats, layouts and channel history"

TV (and Radio An update has been posted about the BBC's Genome project, in which they're scanning every back issue of the Radio Times in order to create a complete programme history for the corporation:

"Once the scanned images of the magazines had been produced, the mammoth task of capturing the text in the Radio Times could be begin.

"This is largely being done automatically, but in order for this to be feasible we had to analyse the magazine formats, layouts and channel history over the 88 year period to create rules could be applied to capture the programme listings in a meaningful way.

"We devised a schema which would house the various parts of the programme listings such as time, title, synopsis, cast, crew and so on, and doing this revealed just how complex the BBC's channel history is."

Scanning is complete. Now they're about the task of creating the database then making it available in 2012. Can't wait.