ABSTRACT
As the World’s largest and most multifarious broadcasting and programme making organisation, the British Broadcasting Corporation has a voracious appetite for information on all subjects and in all forms. To satisfy the information needs of such an organisation (with a staff of 25,000) requires the employment of several hundred librarians, archivists, and other information and documentation staff, working in both highly specialised, and very general units, and dealing with a wide variety of media. This paper will not attempt to catalogue the full range of such services but rather to describe in detail the information and publishing work of BBC Data, the department which is responsible for providing the general reference and information services based on the written or printed word, whether from books, newspapers, on-line services, or from the Corporation’s own working papers. To do this however, it is first necessary to describe the scale, and the information context within which the department and its customers work.
