Talk:BBC Research & Development

I started this page as I have often felt that youngsters do not appreciate the importance of the technical developments that the BBC pioneered. I'm not a BBC man, though they have been central to my career. So come on all you BBC men - fill this page with memories and details and photos (and references to research reports?)! Is there a BBC technical museum? There ought to be!

Lindosland 00:05, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm Ant Miller and I work for BBC R&D as it now is. I'm responsible for the digital ppublic presence of the dept, so I shall post some up to date information on this page. I'm happy to debate the finer points of the etiquette of our posting of information here, but bear in mind the following: We do not profit from this work. Better public understanding of the dept and work we do makes clear where the license fee is going (at least a tiny part of it) Greater collaboration with potential partners can be encouraged- good for them and us.

Meeware 09:53, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has many rules about neutral point of view, conflicts of interest and citing sources, and this can make contributing to it a bit of a tightrope-walk for people who work for the organisations they are writing about. When in doubt it's always a good idea to discuss your intentions on the talk page first, as you have already done. So welcome aboard.


 * BTW one thing that would help spread understanding of BBC R&D's historic work would be the addition of pre-1960 RD Reports to the RD web site, IMHO.--Harumphy (talk) 12:27, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

The publication of historic reports will be maintained when we migrate the current website to a new platform in the new year- it's a core requirement of the update. Having said that, older reports are not thoroughly scanned, and we're currently trying to balance some limited resources on how to best serve users. The next stage is likely to be OCR on the existing scanned docs, with further scanning down the roadlder docs. That older collection is being lodged with the BBC's heritage collection at the moment (part of the relocation work) so the managment of publication of these elements might not be within our management overview in future (though I'm sure we'll be able to make requests). Bear in mind also that as we go further back in time, the format of documentation becomes more archaic- we do have documents from the 1920s, but they form part of monographs and engineering papers- quite different from the current white paper format. I'm actually looking at this issue today, along with creating a section on the new site that looks at the collaborative projects we run. -- Meeware (talk) 16:49, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

The correct dept name is BBC Research & Development, or BBC R&D, and I propose that the page reverts back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_R%26D with redirects from this page. Meeware (talk) 10:21, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Sensible idea. +1 from me. Nevalicori (talk) 10:36, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, it makes sense. I think we'll need an admin to move the page because of the existing redirect at the destination. --Harumphy (talk) 12:27, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Page move performed. Tonywalton Talk 15:57, 8 April 2012 (UTC)