Imagen Gets Implemented In Upgrade Of The BUFVC Off-Air Recording And Media Archive Service

Cambridge Imaging Systems' flagship asset management and publishing solution, Imagen, has been implemented in a major upgrade of the British Universities Film & Video Council's (BUFVC) off-air recording and media archive service, known as BoB National (short for Box of Broadcasts).
The project has created a link from BoB National to the BBC broadcast media archive, providing ERA+ licensed educational institutions with online access to over 1 million television and radio programmes that were broadcast between 2007 and the present day. The project is funded by Jisc, the UK's expert on digital technologies for education and research, and the BBC is a partner in the project.
Access to the archive provides rich media resources that can supplement teaching and improve student engagement, and it also provides a vast amount of research material for academic use. Imagen provides a secure platform from which TV and radio programmes can be easily searched and retrieved; users can also create and share clip compilations and playlists. There is also an EPG menu that allows users to record programmes scheduled in the next seven days from over 60 TV and radio channels from the UK and abroad, and any recordings are then made available for all users.
Subtitle information is extracted from programmes to provide a rich source of searchable metadata, enabling the user to jump straight to the part in the video that is most interesting to them. The content can now be accessed and viewed on tablets and smart phones as well as computers. Content can be embedded in VLEs, and comments can be added to the programmes in a similar way to YouTube comments, to encourage discussion and debate.
Tom Blake, Managing Director, Cambridge Imaging Systems, said: "We're very proud of our involvement in what is probably the world’s largest catch-up TV system for educational purposes. The archive is an invaluable asset to students, teachers and researchers, and can now provide access to material that was previously inaccessible."
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