Video about some of the places where Your Paintings live. 3min 18s

Today we announced the public beta launch of Your Paintings, a unique new initiative to make the UK’s entire national collection of oil paintings available to view online for the first time.

Many people don’t realise that the UK has tens of thousands of paintings in its publicly funded museums and institutions that are not currently viewable by the public, either because they are in storage or are kept in buildings that are inaccessible to the general public. The vast majority of these paintings have never been published online.

Unlocking our cultural heritage

Now, in partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation (a charity established to document this national resource) and hundreds of galleries and collections across the country, BBC Online’s Your Paintings site will begin making these artworks available to view by anyone, anytime, for free.

You can see the site at: www.bbc.co.uk/yourpaintings.

Our initial beta release today already allows you to access over 60,000 paintings from over 800 collections, covering more than 15,000 individual artists. But this is just the start. We’ll be adding thousands more paintings every month, with the aim of having the complete national collection (estimated at around 200,000 works) available within 18 months.

 

Building digital public space

We want Your Paintings to be much more than just a stand-alone website. This is a project rooted in a vision of the interconnected nature of online cultural resources and our ambition is be compatible with, and linked into, as wide a range of other related resources and initiatives as possible.

To enable this kind of interconnection we are working with our partner collections to investigate the provision of an API to the service. There are many complexities to be worked out involving the copyrights that exist in the images and data, but in principle we hope in time to make as much data as possible available. We would love to hear you thoughts and suggestions on this area.

How you can support the project

These paintings have the potential to be an amazingly rich learning resource – not just for art lovers, but for everyone, whether your interest is in history, society, war or even sport or fashion. This is one of the largest pre-photographic records of British society, with images dating back 600 years, and the site will play an important role in our developing knowledge and learning strategy.

We want to unlock this learning potential by working with the public to map the contents of these paintings - through the launch of Your Paintings Tagger. Your Paintings Tagger is a crowd sourced tagging application, built in collaboration with Arfon Smith and the team at Oxford University’s Astrophysics Lab, who were behind the hugely successful Galaxy Zoo website. You can access Tagger and start getting involved here.

With the beta launch today we’ve taken the first steps towards making an enormous quantity of data available to the public, but as ever with these things, there is a long way to go. As we move forward we would love to hear your thoughts, feedback and input on how we can improve and optimise the service. You can get either add a comment below or get in touch with us direct.

Nick Cohen is a Commissioning Executive, Multiplatform

There's been a lot of buzz online this week about the launch of Britain From Above, our latest big "multiplatform" project, where TV and online producers have worked together to reveal some of the extraordinary unseen stories of how Britain works.

Current, Make, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Map Room and others picked up on the pre-release pictures and CGI visualisation video - called "GPS performance art" by the Huffington Post.

Well, I'm happy to say that the full site goes live today and features full versions of those sequences, more video from the TV shows and exclusive web material, designed and produced by Lion TV and Numiko.

It's one of the first times we've created a series like this with online in mind (and part of the team) from the ground up. That meant that even right at the outset - during scriptwriting and storyboarding - the team was thinking about how every last aspect of what they were capturing would work online.  

One nice new feature is embeddable video: you can click on "SHARE" and host the clips, for example in your blog - like this:

Britain From Above is one of the first BBC sites to enable this function, so it would be great to hear how it works for you in the comments below.

Some of the other features include:

• Photography from Jason Hawkes, one of the world's foremost aerial photographers and key contributor on the project
• A map interface to all the video and photos, latitude/longitude metadata for every item and a list of all the video as a .kml download (coming soon, once all the content is live)
• Information on the expert contributors behind the show

And the BBC Archive team has also released an online collection to tie in with the project. Aerial Journeys features some real gems including the BBC's first aerial broadcast and a 1960s series, Bird's Eye View, by none other than John Betjeman. You can see the full selection here.

I hope you enjoy!

Nick Cohen is a Multiplatform Commissioning Executive.

For those who haven't seen it yet, Kermode Uncut is our first attempt at doing a true video blog (or "vlog", if you must). For the BBC, this is partly about experimenting with a powerful new (to us) format and partly about giving Mark a blogging outlet that best suits his style.

As he himself puts it:

I've opted to film a regular blog rather than write because a) it's more exciting and b) let's face it, it's easier for me. I'll be filing these video blogs in my usual grumpy fashion, so don't expect a lot of smiling, or good natured bonhomie. But it's my way of letting off steam, and if you enjoy it too then that's an added bonus.

Simon Dickson at Puffbox (thanks for your generous comments, Simon) rightly points out that it's Mark himself that makes this format work. It feels to me that you definitely need someone with Mark's combination of personality and natural ease in front of the camera to make the video-led approach to blogging work. It won't be right for everyone, by any means.

Ryan Morrison at Up Your Ego raises the question of whether it will be possible to update the video content very regularly. The answer is: yes, absolutely! Mark will be posting a new video at least once a week - the idea being that if you come back on a weekly basis, you'll always get something new. (FYI: the plan is to publish in time for Friday lunchtime - you heard it here first...)

It's obviously new territory for us, so we'd be very keen to hear any further comments or feedback.

See also: our own Dan Taylor talks about the project on his personal blog.

Nick Cohen is a Multiplatform Commissioning Executive.