Prior BBC Genome is not the BBC's first online searchable database. In April 2006, they gave the public access to Infax – their only electronic programme database at the time. It contained around 900,000 entries but not every programme ever broadcast, and it ceased operation in December 2007. The front page of the website is still available to see via the
Internet Archive. After Infax ceased, a message on the website said that it would be incorporating in the information into individual programme pages. In 2012, Infax was replaced by the database Fabric but this is only for internal use within the BBC.
Radio Times 's Christmas". In December 2012, the
BBC completed a digitisation exercise, scanning the listings from
Radio Times of all BBC's programmes from 1923 to 2009 from an entire run of about 4,500 copies of the magazine. They identified around five million programmes involving 8.5 million actors, presenters, writers and technical staff. The listings are as published in advance, and so do not include late changes or cancellations which were reflected on Infax. However, they do include huge numbers of early radio and television broadcasts, and "DJ shows" from
BBC Radio 1 and
BBC Radio 2 which were rarely kept officially, which were not listed on Infax (which also did not usually include repeats of archived programmes prior to 1976) because they were not in the BBC archives. The issues were scanned at
high resolution, producing
TIFF images and
optical character recognition was then used to turn the text from the page into searchable text on the Genome database. Corrections to OCR errors and changes to advertised schedules are being
crowdsourced, Each listing entry has a unique identifier which may be expressed as a URL. For example, the first screening of
Doctor Who is bbc.co.uk. A broadcast programme may have more than one such identifier, if it was broadcast (and thus listed) on repeat occasions, or in different regions.
Other content Digitised editions of entire magazines (including front covers, prose articles, advertisements, and other non-listings content) from the 1920s were added in March 2017; for the 1930s in December 2017; for the 1940s in December 2018; and for the 1950s in December 2019.
Missing listings ==See also==