The BBC has in many ways pushed the adoption and acceptance of the Internet in the UK. For example, it is required to provide a public whole-of-web search engine that takes users to non-BBC web sites.
Here are a few factoids that illustrate how the impact of a cultural institution like the BBC might be measured.
The Guardian reported earlier this month that “The BBC’s digital media services, now grouped together in the future media and technology division, had a budget of £182m during the last financial year, up from £153.7m for 2006-2007.” These figures come from the BBC’s 2007-08 annual report.
This month the Beeb published Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ research “into the economic impact of the BBC’s publicly funded services on the UK broadcasting and creative sector.” The PWC report found that the BBC creates value of “approximately £6.5bn per annum or more than £5bn in the creative sector alone,” is a major provider of training and investment stability for the UK’s creative industries and drives competition and regional development in the creative sector. If the BBC were replaced by a commercial broadcaster, the report says, Britain would lose around £4.4bn of economic impact. (source: BBC Internet blog 22 July 2008)
In 2007 the main BBC web site saw 33 million unique weekly global users including 12 million British adult users per week. More than 16 million BBC podcasts were downloaded in the month of March 2008. (source: BBC Internet blog, 11 July 2008)
The BBC Trust says the Beeb should be a “trusted guide” for Internet users. In a series of blog posts, former BBC.co.uk staffer Martin Belam analyses the Trust’s recommendations about search; on links to external web sites; and on embedded content.
Now the Beeb has appointed Roly Keating as its first Director of Archive Content “with responsibility for maximising public access to the BBC’s invaluable archive of television, radio and multimedia content.” (tip o’ the hat to the BBC Internet blog for this link and quote, and for the quote below)
The BBC TV Archive web site provides more information about digitising and making available this uniquely deep, rich collection of stuff.
In an introductory video Adam Lee remarks:
“We’ve got about 4 million physical items for TV and radio. That’s equivalent to 600,000 hours of TV content and about 350,000 hours of radio. So we’re getting very close now to a million hours of material. We also now have a New Media archive, which is keeping a record of the content that goes out on the BBC’s websites. We also have large sheet-music collections, we have commercial music collections. We have press cuttings going back 40 years as well. So it’s a very large-scale operation.”
How might a university demonstrate its public value? Accepting the maxim that “you value what you count,” what sorts of things should we be keeping count of — the number of books in our libraries, the dollar value of our cultural collections, how many people visit our exhibitions? And what else?