Introduction

In this chapter we discuss the creation of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of letters taken from the public archives of British Telecom (BT) that were written by nearly 400 authors on a wide variety of topics between 1853 and 1982.

In the first part of the chapter we discuss our experiences working on the New Connections project, funded by Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) and a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage and The National Archives, focusing particularly on the methodological issues we encountered. The corpus was created to address a gap in existing corpus resources, and so that researchers (primarily linguists) could access and, crucially, engage with the language of the letters.

Since the completion of the BTCC we have put together a funding bid to expand the corpus to include correspondence written to and from the Post Office, an institution with many historical links to BT. This chapter addresses issues surrounding institutional collaboration in both phases of this ongoing research.

Part one: New connections

The BT Archives

BT is the world's oldest communications company, tracing its history back to the formation of the Electric Telegraph Company in 1846.

The Post Office held a monopoly over telecommunications in the United Kingdom from 1912 through much of the twentieth century. In 1969 Post Office Telecommunications became a separate government department and, following the British Telecommunications Act of 1981, British Telecommunications became a public corporation. BT was ultimately privatised in 1984. The BT Archives were established in 1986 to store and preserve the company's historical documents and records.

BT's historical status as a British government department and public corporation means that the pre-privatisation material in the archive is public record and BT is obliged to promote access to it. BT Heritage fulfil this responsibility by maintaining a physical archive of documents in Holborn, London. While this archive is open to the public, access to the offices is limited to six hours on two days a week.

The New Connections project was set up in 2011 to address the limited accessibility of the archives, by cataloguing, digitising and developing a searchable online archive of almost half a million photographs, images, documents and correspondence assembled by BT over 165 years.