The BBC Archives are collections documenting the BBC's broadcasting history, including copies of television and radio broadcasts, internal documents, photographs, online content, sheet music, commercially available music, BBC products (including toys, games, merchandise, books, publications, and program releases on VHS, Beta, Laserdisc, DVD, vinyl, audio cassette, audio book CD, and Blu-ray), press cuttings, artefacts and historic equipment.[1] The original contents of the collections are permanently retained, but are in the process of being digitised. Some collections have been uploaded to the BBC Archives section of the BBC Online website for visitors to view. The archive is one of the largest broadcast archives in the world, with over 15 million items.
The BBC Archives encompass numerous collections containing materials produced and acquired by the BBC. The earliest material dates back to 1890.[2] The archives contain 15 million items on 60 miles of shelving spread over several sites, and include approximately 1 million hours of playable media.[2] Items are managed using a bar code system for locating stored items and tracking items that have been lent out.[2] The BBC says that the budget for managing, protecting and digitising the archive accounts for only a small part of its overall budget.[2]
The BBC is engaging in an ongoing project to digitise and preserve their entire archived programme material, migrating (transferring) recordings made on older analogue formats such as film, audio tape, videotape, vinyl, wax cylinders etc. on to today's latest electronic formats as digital files, which are compatible with modern computer hardware and software equipment and systems. The BBC Archives are constantly preserving, cataloguing and digitising its physical formats in order to safeguard material that is physically deteriorating for the future. Their aim is to eventually create a complete digital archive where they no longer have to use now obsolete media formats and their respective equipment. The BBC can instead then continue to preserve original master material in their secure vaults. The BBC Archives have contingencies in place when digitising material so that digitised copies are not accidentally overwritten, encrypted, deleted, incorrectly catalogued, incorrectly labelled, and no more than one copy of each (other than various back up spare copies and other copies at various different sites) is digitised into the BBC Digital Archives.
Much of the audio-visual material was originally recorded on formats which are now obsolete and incompatible with modern broadcast equipment due to the fact that the machines used to reproduce many formats are no longer being manufactured. Additionally, some film and audio formats are slowly disintegrating, and digitisation also serves as a digital preservation programme.
The BBC Archive website was relaunched online in 2008 and has provided newly released historical material regularly since then.[3] The BBC works in partnership with the British Film Institute (BFI), The National Archives and other partners in working with and using the materials.[2]
In 2012, BBC Archive Development produced a book - primarily aimed as BBC staff - titled 'BBC Archive Collections: What's In The Archive And How To Use Them'.[4] This book describes the BBC's archive collections and offers guidance around on how items from the collections can be reused online.
Buildings
From 1963 to 2010, the majority of television material of nationally networked programmes in the BBC Archive were housed at the archive centre in Windmill Road, Brentford, in west London. Television programmes were also stored by the Open University in Milton Keynes, and by BBC nations and regional libraries around the country. In the late 1990s, and early in the 2000s material from the radio side of the BBC were also stored on the site. The condition of the three Windmill Road buildings deteriorated over the years and suffered occasional flooding incidents, and eventually the archive was relocated to a new centre at Perivale Park, Perivale, three miles north of the old site. The new BBC Archive Centre was opened in Summer 2010 and all material was successfully moved by March 2011.
Material is stored in thirteen vaults, controlled to match the best climate for the material inside them, and named after a different BBC personality depending on the content contained in them. In addition to the vaults, new editing, preservation and workrooms have been added so that the material can easily be transferred between formats as well as viewed, restored and digitised for future posterity. The building has also been fitted with fire suppression systems to protect the archive in the event of an incident at the centre, so the total loss of the archive is avoided.
As of April 2019, the BBC Archives employ around 200 staff, most of whom are based at the Archive Centre in Perivale.[5]
Television Archive
The BBC Television Archive contains over 1.5 million tape items as well as over 600,000 cans of film material. The archive itself holds extensive material from approximately the mid-1970s onwards, when important recordings at the broadcaster were retained for the future.[6]
Recordings from before this date are less comprehensively preserved; the process of telerecording was originally invented in 1947[7] while videotape recording was gradually introduced from the late 1950s onwards,[8] but due to the expense of the tapes,[9] recording was seen for production use only with recordings subsequently being lost.[8] or telerecordings being junked. The exceptions in the early years were usually occasions of great importance, such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.[7] In addition, numerous programmes at the time were broadcast 'live' and so utilised no recording procedure in the production process.[7] The earliest item in the collection is from 1936.[10][11]
Today, the majority of programmes are kept, including news, entertainment, drama and a selection of other long-running programmes such as quiz shows.[12] The remaining material from the television archive is offered to the British Film Institute prior to being disposed of.[13]
The BBC Sound Archive contains the archived output from the BBC's radio output. Widespread recordings exist in the archive from the mid-1930s, when recording of programmes and speeches were kept for rebroadcast; the catalyst for this was the launch of the BBC Empire Service in 1932 and the subsequent rebroadcast of speeches from political leaders at a time convenient in the different time zones.[14] Prior to this, the broadcast of recordings was seen as being false to the listener and was avoided.[15]
Any recordings made were frequently disposed of and it was the efforts of Marie Slocombe, who founded the Sound Archive in 1937 when she retained recordings of prominent figures in the country, that the archive became into being officially when she was appointed the Sounds Recording Librarian in 1941.[16]
Today, all of the BBC's radio output is recorded for re-use,[17] with approximately 66% of output being preserved in the Archives;[17] programmes involving guests or live performances from artists are kept,[17] whereas programmes in which the DJ plays commercially available music are only sampled and not kept entirely.[17] Prior to any material being disposed of, the material is offered to the British Library Sound Archive.[13]
The archive consists of multiple formats including wax cylinders,[18] numerous gramophone records made from both shellac and vinyl,[19] as well as numerous more recordings on tape, CD and on digital audio tape (DAT).[20] The difficulty of these different formats is the availability of the machines required to play them; some of the records in the archive are 16 inches in diameter and require large phonograph units to play,[19] while the players for the wax cylinders and DATs are no longer in production.[20] There are also 700,000 vinyl records, 180,000 78rpm records, 400,000 LP records and 350,000 CDs in the archive.[21]
The Radio Digital Archive has been capturing radio programmes as broadcast quality wav files since 2008, with over 1.5 million recordings, a number growing daily.
Some of the wax cylinder collection has been donated to the British Library.
The Sound Archive is based at the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale, along with the television archive, and was previously based at Windmill Road, Brentford.
Written Archives
The BBC Written Archives contain all the internal written documents and communications from the corporation from the launch in 1922 to the present day.[22][23] Its collections shed light into the behind the scenes workings of the corporation and also elaborate on the difficulties of getting a television or radio programme to or off the air as the case may be.[24] The archive guidelines state that access to files post-1980 is restricted due to the current nature of the files; the general exception to this rule are documents such as scripts and Programme as Broadcast records.
The Written Archives are located at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, Berkshire, near Reading.[22] The centre houses the archive on four and a half miles of shelving along with reading rooms. The centre is different from the other BBC Archives in that the centre opens for writers and academic researchers in higher education.[22]
Photographic Library
The BBC Photographic Library is responsible for approximately 7 million images,[25] dating back to 1922,[26] created for publicity purposes and subsequently kept for future use.[27] In addition to programme promotion, a large number of images are of historic events which are often incorporate into the daily news bulletins; as a result, half the photographic library team work specifically with these images.[28] The images themselves are kept as originals in the archive, with digitisation only utilised when a specific image is required for use, when the image is sent in a digital format.[29] Copies of images are also used in case any images are damaged due to vinegar syndrome and other issues.[30]
At the turn of the millennium, the BBC launched the BBC Archive Treasure Hunt, a public appeal to recover pre-1980s lost BBC radio and television productions.[32] Original material of many programmes was lost due to the practice of discarding recordings because of the need to reduce costs, copyright issues and for technical reasons.[33][34]
The Licence was a trial, launched in 2005, and notable for the re-release of part of the BBC News' archive and programmes made by the BBC Natural History Unit for creative use by the public. While artists and teachers were encouraged to use the content to create works of their own, the terms of the licence were restrictive compared to copyleft licences. Use of Creative Archive content for commercial, "endorsement, campaigning, defamatory or derogatory purposes" was forbidden, any derivative works were to be released under the same licence, and content was only to be used within the UK.[38][39] The trial ended in 2006 following a review by the BBC Trust and works released under the licence were withdrawn.[38]
Voices from the Archives
Voices from the Archives was a former BBC project, launched in partnership with BBC Four that provided free access to audio interviews with various notable people and professions from a variety of political, religious and social backgrounds. The website ceased to be updated in June 2005, and the concept was instead adopted by BBC Radio 4 as a collection of film interviews from various programmes.
Heritage Collection
Previous Archives logo
The BBC Heritage Collection is the newest of the BBC Archives and holds historic broadcast technology, art, props and merchandise.[40] The collection was created out of personal collections and bequeaths by former staff members, as the BBC had no formal policy on the heritage collection until c.2003.[40]
The heritage collection itself has no single permanent home, as the majority of objects are on display, either around BBC properties or on loan to museums or other collections; the most significant museum housing the collection is the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.[44]
Over the years, the BBC has used various programme catalogue databases to keep a record of the programmes in the archives. Internal databases include Infax and Fabric, and publicly accessible databases include BBC Genome and BBC Programmes.
The BBC World Service is an international broadcaster owned and operated by the BBC. It is the world's largest external broadcaster in terms of reception area, language selection and audience reach. It broadcasts radio news, speech and discussions in more than 40 languages to many parts of the world on analogue and digital shortwave platforms, internet streaming, podcasting, satellite, DAB, FM and MW relays. In 2024, the World Service reached an average of 450 million people a week. In November 2016, the BBC announced that it would start broadcasting in additional languages including Amharic and Igbo, in its biggest expansion since the 1940s.
Delia Ann Derbyshire was an English musician and composer of electronic music. She carried out notable work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who. She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music", having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.
Television broadcasts in the United Kingdom began in 1932, however, regular broadcasts would only begin four years later. Television began as a public service which was free of advertising, which followed the first demonstration of a transmitted moving image in 1926. Currently, the United Kingdom has a collection of free-to-air, free-to-view and subscription services over a variety of distribution media, through which there are over 480 channels for consumers as well as on-demand content. There are six main channel owners who are responsible for most material viewed.
BBC Radio 3 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. It replaced the BBC Third Programme in 1967 and broadcasts classical music and opera, with jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also featuring. The station has described itself as "the world's most significant commissioner of new music".
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction comedy radio series primarily written by Douglas Adams. It was originally broadcast in the United Kingdom by BBC Radio 4 in 1978, and afterwards the BBC World Service, National Public Radio in the US and CBC Radio in Canada. The series was the first radio comedy programme to be produced in stereo, and was innovative in its use of music and sound effects, winning a number of awards.
The British Library Sound Archive, formerly the British Institute of Recorded Sound; also known as the National Sound Archive (NSA), in London, England is among the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings. It holds more than six million recordings, including over a million discs and 200,000 tapes. These include commercial record releases, radio broadcasts, and privately made recordings.
Nationwide is a BBC current affairs television programme which ran from 9 September 1969 until 5 August 1983. Originally broadcast on BBC 1 from Tuesday to Thursday, and then each weekday from 1972, it followed the early evening news, and included the regional opt-out news programmes.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), known as ScreenSound Australia from 1999 to 2004, is Australia's audiovisual archive, responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting, and providing access to a national collection of film, television, sound, radio, video games, new media, and related documents and artefacts. The collection ranges from works created in the late nineteenth century when the recorded sound and film industries were in their infancy, to those made in the present day.
The Dad's Army missing episodes are lost episodes and sketches of the British television sitcom Dad's Army. The programme ran for nine series from 31 July 1968 to 13 November 1977. Three out of six episodes from the second series and two of the four Christmas sketches are missing because, at that time, the BBC routinely reused videotape as a cost-saving measure.
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision is an archive that was launched on 31 July 2014, following the completion of a three-year process whereby the New Zealand Film Archive "absorbed" the collections and operations of the RNZ Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero in 2012 and the Television New Zealand Archive in 2014.
British Library Sounds is a British Library service providing free online access to a diverse range of spoken word, music and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive. Anyone with web access can use the service to search, browse and listen to 50,000 digitised recordings. Playback and download of an additional 22,000 recordings is available to Athens or Shibboleth users in UK higher and further education. The service was originally launched with funding by the Jisc.
The RTÉ Libraries and Archives are a collection of photographs, sounds recordings, video footage and written records in various formats across a wide range of topics pertaining to Irish life and society.
Learning on Screen - The British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) is a representative body promoting the production, study and use of moving image, sound and related media for learning and research. It is a company limited by guarantee, with charity status, serving schools, colleges and post compulsory education interests in the UK.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current state with its current name on New Year's Day 1927. The oldest and largest local and global broadcaster by stature and by number of employees, the BBC employs over 21,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 17,200 are in public-sector broadcasting.
The BBC Sound Archive is a collection of audio recordings maintained by the BBC and founded in 1936. Its recordings date back to the late 19th century and include many rare items, including contemporary speeches by public and political figures, folk music, British dialects and sound effects.
The JISC Digitisation Programme was a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural memory organizations in the United Kingdom, from 2004 to 2010 The program was managed by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.
EUscreen is a website that provides free access to Europe's television heritage through videos, articles, images and audio from European audiovisual archives and broadcasters. Its digitised content covers a period from early 1900 until today. EUscreen "aligns the heterogeneous collections held throughout Europe and encourages the exploration of Europe's cultural and television history by different user groups". EUscreen is also the name of the overarching network of institutions working on providing access European audiovisual collections.
The Österreichische Mediathek is the Austrian archive for sound recordings and videos on cultural and contemporary history. It was founded in 1960 as Österreichische Phonothek by the Ministry of Education and has been a branch of the Technisches Museum Wien since 2001. As video and sound archive, the Österreichische Mediathek is responsible for the preservation of the Austrian audio-visual cultural heritage.
The Television New Zealand Archive collection contains over 600,000 hours of television spanning almost 55 years of New Zealand's public television history. It includes New Zealand content such as documentaries, dramas, sports programmes and every TVNZ news broadcast from December 1986 to 2014. The archive only holds titles that have previously been broadcast – raw footage is not included. The archive also includes thousands of photographic stills. Both TVNZ and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage hold a list of the titles held in the TVNZ Archive collection. This has subsequently been released under the Official Information Act. The Ministry considers the majority of titles to be of high heritage and cultural value and the Minister of Broadcasting Craig Foss stated it was a "unique record of life in New Zealand". The contents of the collection are subject to the Public Records Act 2005. In 2014 the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, on behalf of the Crown, became the guardian of the archive. The physical collection is located in the Wellington region, in the former TVNZ Avalon facility now owned by the Department of Internal Affairs.
'Unlocking Our Sound Heritage' (UOSH) is a UK-wide project that aims to preserve, digitise and provide public access to a large part of the nation's sound heritage. The UOSH project forms part of the core programme 'Save Our Sounds' led by the British Library and involving a consortium of ten regional and national archival institutions. Between 2017 and 2022 the aim is to digitise and make available up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds recordings, not only from the British Library's collection but from across the UK, dating from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present time. The recordings include sounds such as local dialects and accents, oral histories, previously inaccessible musical performances and plays, and rare wildlife sounds. The consortium will also deliver various public engagement programmes, and a website where up to 100,000 recordings will be freely available to everyone for research, enjoyment and inspiration.
1 2 3 4 5 Kiss, Jemima (18 August 2010). "In The BBC Archive". Tech Weekly. London: Guardian News & Media Ltd. Archived from the original on 21 August 2010. Retrieved 21 August 2010.
↑ Stuart Douglas - www.thiswaydown.org (7 July 1965). "missing episodes articles". Btinternet.com. Archived from the original on 14 August 2010. Retrieved 30 July 2010.
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