A recent revamp of the BBC Archive homepage includes a few new features that will hopefully make finding content that little bit easier.

Now that the Archive site has more than 40 collections, we realised visitors to the site might appreciate different ways of browsing the content. The Collections page originally listed collections in reverse order of release, but we felt that the release order had more meaning to us than our users, so the page has been reordered with collections grouped into themes. We've also added an RSS feed to the Collections page so you can see when new content is added to the site.

We've added new pages to allow you to search for specific programme titles and people, accessed from the new, brighter navigation bar. The People pages collate programmes, documents and images specific to an individual contributor and, where the contributor appears in a gallery, you can click on thumbnails of the image to leap straight to that specific image. Have a look at our David Attenborough page for an example.

The latest tweets on our Twitter feed are now available via our homepage. We know Twitter has a marmite quality for some, but we've been really pleased with how our feed has been received by Twitterers who like to forward our comments to their own followers. There are still some discussions on the best way to display this, so if you're on Twitter, let us know what you think (or you can drop us a line via the feedback link at the bottom of our Help page).

The new 'Today's Choice' box allows us the opportunity to make the page feel more topical. Of course, handling material that's often more than 50 years old might not feel topical to some, but as the activity around our Bank Holidays collection showed, if you're stuck indoors looking at the rain tricking down the window on your day off, you might gain some comfort to discover that for British Bank Holidays it was always thus.

We've added more links to other areas on the BBC that contain archive material, such as the 'In Our Time' archive and recommended links to elsewhere on the web, like the Imperial War Museum. This is an area we'll be keeping an eye on because there are so many great places to link to and only a finite number of slots for us to use. Hopefully the links will be useful for those visitors to the site who wish to find out what other archive resources exist out there.

We're continuing to tinker under the bonnet for more features in the future. We're hoping to be able to improve our Programmes page to allow multiple editions from the same series to be grouped together, so that fans of, say, 'Tomorrow's World', will be able to keep track of additional editions that appear within other collections. We'll be continuing to look into the BBC's war archive of course, to commemorate various anniversaries in the near future too, and next week, as part of the BBC's Year of Science, we'll be launching a collection that should be of interest to anyone who's ever wondered how elastic bands tell us a staggering amount about the universe around us. Stay tuned for more.

Jim Sangster is an Assistant Content Producer, BBC Archive.

I first spoke to Paul King, the producer / director of James May on the Moon, back in April when I was beginning to compile a list of older archive gems for our Moon Landings collection. Paul had suggested some of the programmes we were looking at, and happened to mention that he'd recorded interviews with three of the Apollo astronauts, but that as he'd had to cut most of the material out of his final programme, he might be able to give us his off-cuts. 'Did you speak to Neil Armstrong?' I asked. 'No, but we got Charlie Duke,' said Paul. I wasn't really sure which one Charlie was to be honest, but that was before I spent a week wading through the footage and getting to know him, and Alan Bean and 'second-to-last-man-on-the-moon' Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt. I'm now a bit of a fan.

The three astronauts each have a different approach to their experiences, and each of them had a compelling story to tell.

Alan Bean was already an amateur painter when he went to the moon, and has dedicated the rest of his life to documenting his experiences in paint. He's passionate about his art - both in the way he compiles his pieces through the addition of bits of moon dust and scraps of spacesuit as well as his unique boast that he's the only artist in human history to go to the moon.

Harrison Schmitt, as one of the final two Apollo astronauts, feels he's something of a custodian. Through his calm, considered, statesmanlike persona, you can sense an impatience in him to see the next generation of lunar astronauts, in which he hopes NASA will continue to play an integral role.

And then there's Charlie Duke, who, despite being in his seventies now, still has a youthful enthusiasm. It's lovely to see him illustrate his lunar journey with a model lunar module, unconsciously mirroring the actions of generations of children back on Earth who played with toy replicas and dreamed of being astronauts themselves.

I never got to be an astronaut, but I never lost my admiration for the real ones. In this collection, I wanted to represent some of the BBC people who I found so fascinating as a child. There's Patrick Moore of course. We've been able to include a few editions of The Sky at Night, including one from 1960 where Patrick announces, with almost palpable disappointment, that there's no life on that rock up there. Patrick joins another TV hero, James Burke, for the BBC's coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, represented here thanks to a compilation of various surviving assets edited together by my colleague Paul Vanezis. Now, thanks to the three interviews from James May on the Moon, we managed to combine the old and the new, bringing the collection completely up to date.

The archive continues to help us make historical events immediate and relevant, and occasionally it gives us the chance to consort with people we've personally regarded as broadcasting heroes. Three days after the Moon Landings collection was released, we received a call from Reg Turnill. He worked for the BBC for nearly 50 years as correspondent on all things space. Anyone who grew up watching Newsround or Blue Peter would recognise him from his various reports over the years. He had a skill in making the incomprehensible instantly accessible. I'd wager it's his voice we hear in our minds every time we hear the word Skylab. Reg had stumbled across our collection thanks to three news reports of his that we'd included, and wanted to offer a small correction as I'd misspelled the name of the astronaut Don Lind. Don's name didn't appear in the original paperwork for the item, nor in our programme database, so thanks to Reg, I was able to amend that programme page and our database. He's 94 years old, he's still contributing to the BBC archive.

Viewers in the early '70s objected strongly to repeats of black and white shows when they were paying for a colour TV licence, but less than a decade later, the advent of the home video recorder led to a change of attitude: suddenly, those old monochrome programmes were of interest - and loads of them had now been wiped to make room for new programmes.

You can hear more about this from our archive expert, Adam Lee:

I mention this because, considering the archive policies of most British broadcasters at the time (yes, some ITV companies wiped programmes too), it's often amazing to discover which programmes were kept - and find programmes that few people even knew had ever existed.

Recently, the BBC Archive web team launched two collections of programmes via our web site. For What We Wore, we unearthed the BBC's first ever full colour TV series, made a decade before anyone else could even see colour TV.

As well as being a landmark production in TV terms, Men, Women And Clothes took a trip through time to explore the fashions of the previous two hundred years. And thanks to someone putting their address book to good use, the series boasts an impressive cast of stars of the day, including Dora Bryan, Ron Moody, Benny Hill and the Redgrave family, who act as models for the costumes.

While researching our other recent collection, Francis Bacon at the BBC, we found a pilot - a test programme made to show the TV commissioners what a full series might be like.

In this item, Francis Bacon talks in his inimitable way about the history of art and artists, and the interview concludes with both Francis and the interviewer, Julian Jebb, reaching for their cigarettes and lighting up. Why this edition was kept, yet others from the series that followed were junked, we might never know.

The Francis Bacon collection was an interesting test case in itself. It involved a lot of negotiation with the people at the Design & Artists Copyright Society (DACS) as well as with Tate Britain and the Francis Bacon Estate.

It also meant a lengthy selection process as we whittled down an initial wishlist of 30 or more programmes into a more manageable ten.

Due to various rights issues, some programmes fell by the wayside fairly quickly. We discovered that an edition of Arena from 1984 was actually a film made by an American company and bought in - the only bits the BBC owned were the opening title sequence and the end credits.

An earlier programme, Fragments Of A Portrait, contained a short clip from the Russian cinema classic Battleship Potemkin, which we were unable to clear the rights to show as part of the programme (a painful but necessary edit to the sequence allowed us to include the programme in this collection).

While many people, even within the BBC, assume that the BBC (and by extension the public) owns everything in its archives, it's often disappointing and frustrating to discover how rare that's actually the case.

We might own the physical tape, but the broadcast rights involve the writer, the performers, musicians, sporting bodies and other broadcasters. But every now and then, among the stuff we do own, we find such gems as Benny Hill, smirking away while sporting a variety of facial hair arrangements through the ages.

While there are plenty of opportunities to catch more familiar programmes like Doctor Who or Blackadder through DVDs or repeats on cable, it's forgotten gems like this that make the archive such a surprising place to explore.

Jim Sangster is an Assistant Content Producer, BBC Archive and is an author and broadcaster. His own appearances in the BBC archive include appearances on Pure 24, Call The Cops and as a question setter for a specialist subject round on Mastermind.