It’s nice to see that BBC Programme Catalogue (built with RubyOnRails and MySQL) has gone live. Here is some historical background from the about page:

The BBC has been cataloguing and indexing its programmes since the 1920s. The development of the programme catalogue has reflected the changes in the BBC and in broadcasting over the last seventy five years. For example, in the early days of broadcasting, for both Radio and TV, the majority of programmes were broadcast live and were never recorded. There was therefore little point at the time to do extensive cataloguing and indexing of material that did not exist. As you will see, the number of catalogue entries for a day in the 1990s, far exceeds the entries for a day from the 1950s.

As recording technology developed in both mediums, the requirement to keep material for re-use also grew. If material was going to be re-used, it had to be catalogued and indexed. The original records of radio programmes were handwritten into books; over time, card catalogues were developed, and from the mid-1980s onwards there have been computer based catalogues.

This experimental catalogue database holds over 900,000 entries. It is a sub-set of the data from the internal BBC database created and maintained by the BBC’s Information and Archives department. This public version is updated daily as new records are added and updated in the main catalogue. This figure is so high because, for example, each TV news story now has an individual entry in the catalogue.

Talk about sexy retrospective conversion eh? Hats off to Matt Biddulph and his colleagues. I wish I was going to RailsConf to hear more of the technical details. Actually, if you haven’t already take a look at the RailsConf program–it looks like it’s going to be a great event.