New BBC Archive pages launch.

TV The BBC have officially launched their relaunch of their archive pages with a long press release stressing the thousands of clips, many transposed from their Twitter feed and Facebook:
"The launch date coincides with the 50th anniversary of Nationwide, the early evening precursor to the One Show that featured quirky stories from around the UK between 1969 and 1983. Many of these delightful characters and oddball reports are finding a fresh worldwide audience online. The website brings together the best of these in an easy-to-use way that viewers can explore at their leisure."
It is of course and incredible resource but I still have a couple of suggestions:

(1)  Tags.  It would be really handy if the clips and their pages had clickable tags on them, for programme titles or key content.  That way the user could click on a programme title and find all the clips which appeared on the programme (hopefully with the additional option of sorting by date).  Or everything featuring William Shakespeare.  That sort of thing.

(2) Better organisation and linkage with elsewhere on the BBC website. This Face to Face with Anthony Burgess doesn't also appear on The Late Show page even as a clip and there isn't a link through to that page which would be very useful.  The BBC website also already contains a trove of clips on those programme pages which go unseen, so it seems right that there should be more cross-pollination.

(3)  Why aren't the whole programmes featured here as "clips" also on the iPlayer?  Is it the upload quality of the streams or money?  I bet it's money.

(4)  The links through to the BBC Genome are helpful, but it would be equally useful if a reciprocal link appeared there too.  This also needs to be more consistent.  There are loads of programmes which don't have this useful information on their BBC Archive page.

But all in all this is a fabulous time hole, and don't forget the clips page is in backwards chronological order so you can keep an eye out for new clips as they're added.  Hopefully there'll eventually be a workflow which causes clips added to the Twitter feed to automatically be cross posted here.

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