We study the Bishop-Phelps-Bollobàs property $\left( \text{BPBp} \right)$ for compact operators. We present some abstract techniques that allow us to carry the $\text{BPBp}$ for compact operators from sequence spaces to function spaces. As main applications, we prove the following results. Let $X$ and $Y$ be Banach spaces. If $\left( {{c}_{0}},Y \right)$ has the $\text{BPBp}$ for compact operators, then so do $\left( {{C}_{0}}\left( L \right),Y \right)$ for every locally compact Hausdorff topological space $L$ and $\left( X,\,Y \right)$ whenever ${{X}^{*}}$ is isometrically isomorphic to ${{\ell }_{1}}$. If ${{X}^{*}}$ has the Radon-Nikodým property and $\left( {{\ell }_{1}}\left( X \right),\,Y \right)$ has the $\text{BPBp}$ for compact operators, then so does $\left( {{L}_{1}}\left( \mu ,X \right),\,\,Y \right)$ for every positive measure $\mu $; as a consequence, $\left( {{L}_{1}}\left( \mu ,X \right),\,\,Y \right)$ has the $\text{BPBp}$ for compact operators when $X$ and $Y$ are finite-dimensional or $Y$ is a Hilbert space and $X={{c}_{0}}$ or $X={{L}_{p}}\left( v \right)$ for any positive measure $v$ and $1\,<\,p\,<\,\infty $. For $1\,\le p\,<\,\infty$, if $\left( X,{{l}_{p}}(Y) \right)$ has the $\text{BPBp}$ for compact operators, then so does $\left( X,{{L}_{p}}\left( \mu ,\,Y \right) \right)$ for every positive measure $\mu $ such that ${{L}_{1}}\left( \mu \right)$ is infinite-dimensional. If $\left( X,\,Y \right)$ has the $\text{BPBp}$ for compact operators, then so do $\left( X,\,{{L}_{\infty }}\left( \mu ,\,\,Y \right) \right)$ for every $\sigma $-finite positive measure $\mu $ and $\left( X,\,C\left( K,\,Y \right) \right)$ for every compact Hausdorff topological space $K$.