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To find out how this came about, we met the brains behind the idea, Jo Kent, who told us more.

Could you tell us what In Our Time Archive is?

It's a new way of finding 'In Our Time' programmes in the archive. Instead of us coming up with a few broad categories and putting loads of programmes in each, we’ve marked up each programme with exactly what its content is about, so you look for a subject that interests you and you’ll only be shown those programmes that are about that.

Why not just stick with a traditional website?

We’d noticed that people weren’t getting far into our archive, and only the top programmes in our A-Z list were being listened to. We had some broad categories like History, and they contained over 100 episodes, so only a fraction of them were visible on the page when you went into the category, and few people were going through to the second or third pages. There was no way of really narrowing down the episodes to find just the programmes that interested you, and the ordering was simply alphabetical, so unless you happened to know the name of a programme it was hard to find it.

How did you simplify the discovery process?

We decided to take a completely different approach, to label the episodes simply with what they were actually about, and let the magic of linked data build our categories for us. We did this for all of our episodes, and only listed those categories that had more than one episode in them. This gave us lots of small, accurate categories which we think are much more interesting than the broad categories we had previously.