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BBC Archives are collections documenting the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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...
'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, artifacts and historic equipment.
The original contents of the collections are permanently retained but are in the process of being digitised. Some collections are being uploaded to the BBC Archives section of the
BBC Online
BBC Online, formerly known as BBCi, is the BBC's online service. It is a large network of websites including such high-profile sites as BBC News and BBC Sport, Sport, the on-demand video and radio services branded BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds, t ...
website for visitors to view. The archive is one of the largest broadcast archives in the world, with over 15 million items.
Overview
The BBC Archives encompass numerous collections containing materials produced and acquired by the BBC. The earliest material dates back to 1890.
The archives contain 15 million items on 60 miles of shelving spread over several sites, and include approximately 1 million hours of playable media.
Items are managed using a
bar code
A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly referred to as linear or o ...
system for locating stored items and tracking items that have been lent out.
The BBC says that the budget for managing, protecting and digitising the archive accounts for only a small part of its overall budget.
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. BBC Archives is constantly preserving, cataloguing and digitising its physical formats in order to safeguard material that is physically deteriorating for the future. Where 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 used for playing and migrating physical formats on to other physical formats. The BBC can instead then to continue to preserve original master material in their secure vaults. BBC Archives has 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. The BBC works in partnership with the
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute (BFI) is a film and television charitable organisation which promotes and preserves film-making and television in the United Kingdom. The BFI uses funds provided by the National Lottery to encourage film production, ...
(BFI),
The National Archives
National archives are central archives maintained by countries. This article contains a list of national archives.
Among its more important tasks are to ensure the accessibility and preservation of the information produced by governments, both ...
and other partners in working with and using the materials.
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'. 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
Brentford is a suburban town in West London, England and part of the London Borough of Hounslow. It lies at the confluence of the River Brent and the Thames, west of Charing Cross.
Its economy has diverse company headquarters buildings whi ...
, in
west London
West London is the western part of London, England, north of the River Thames, west of the City of London, and extending to the Greater London boundary.
The term is used to differentiate the area from the other parts of London: North 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
Perivale () is an area of Greater London, west of Charing Cross. It is the smallest of the seven towns which make up the London Borough of Ealing.
Perivale is mostly residential, with a library, community centre, a number of parks and open ...
, 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, BBC Archives employs around 200 staff, most of whom are based at the Archive Centre in Perivale.
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.
Recordings from before this date are less comprehensively preserved; the process of
telerecording was originally invented in 1947
while videotape recording was gradually introduced from the late 1950s onwards,
but due to the expense of the tapes,
recording was seen for production use only with recordings subsequently being
lost
Lost may refer to getting lost, or to:
Geography
*Lost, Aberdeenshire, a hamlet in Scotland
* Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, or LOST, a hiking and cycling trail in Florida, US
History
*Abbreviation of lost work, any work which is known to have bee ...
.
or telerecordings being junked. The exceptions in the early years were usually occasions of great importance, such as the
coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
The coronation of Elizabeth II took place on 2 June 1953 at Westminster Abbey in London. She acceded to the throne at the age of 25 upon the death of her father, George VI, on 6 February 1952, being proclaimed queen by her privy and executive ...
.
In addition, numerous programmes at the time were broadcast 'live' and so utilised no recording procedure in the production process.
The earliest item in the collection is from 1936.
Today, the majority of programmes are kept, including news, entertainment, drama and a selection of other long-running programmes such as quiz shows.
The remaining material from the television archive is offered to the
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute (BFI) is a film and television charitable organisation which promotes and preserves film-making and television in the United Kingdom. The BFI uses funds provided by the National Lottery to encourage film production, ...
prior to being disposed of.
Sound Archive
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 #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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in 1932 and the subsequent rebroadcast of speeches from political leaders at a time convenient in the different time zones.
Prior to this, the broadcast of recordings was seen as being false to the listener and was avoided.
Any recordings made were frequently disposed of and it was the efforts of
Marie Slocombe
Marie Tapscott Slocombe (1912–1995) founded the BBC Sound Archive in 1936. Her keen interest in audio recordings and folk music have made her legacy important in the history of recorded sound.
Early life and career
Born in 1912, Slocombe studie ...
, 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.
Today, all of the BBC's radio output is recorded for re-use,
with approximately 66% of output being preserved in the Archives;
programmes involving guests or live performances from artists are kept
whereas programmes in which the DJ plays commercially available music are only sampled and not kept entirely.
Prior to any material being disposed of, the material is offered to the
British Library Sound Archive
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 a ...
.
The archive consists of multiple formats including
wax cylinders
Phonograph cylinders are the earliest commercial medium for Sound recording and reproduction, recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1896–1916), these hollow cylinder, cylind ...
,
numerous
gramophone records
A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English), or simply a record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near ...
made from both shellac and vinyl.
as well as numerous more recordings on
tape, CD and on
digital audio tape (DAT).
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
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...
units to play,
while the players for the wax cylinders and DATs are no longer in production.
There are also 700,000 vinyl records, 180,000 78's records, 400,000
LP record
The LP (from "long playing" or "long play") is an analog sound storage medium, a phonograph record format characterized by: a speed of rpm; a 12- or 10-inch (30- or 25-cm) diameter; use of the "microgroove" groove specification; and a ...
and 350,000
Cd's in the archive.
The Radio Digital Archive has been capturing radio programmes as broadcast quality wav files since 2008, with now over 1.5 million recordings 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.
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.
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
Caversham is a suburb of Reading, England. Originally a village founded in the Middle Ages, it lies on the north bank of the River Thames, opposite the rest of Reading. Caversham Bridge, Reading Bridge, Christchurch Bridge, and Caversham Lock pr ...
, near
Reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of Letter (alphabet), letters, symbols, etc., especially by Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process invo ...
.
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.
Photographic Library
The BBC Photographic Library is responsible for approximately 7 million images,
dating back to 1922, created for publicity purposes and subsequently kept for future use.
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.
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.
Copies of images are also used in case any images are damaged due to
vinegar syndrome
Cellulose acetate film, or safety film, is used in photography as a base material for photographic emulsions. It was introduced in the early 20th century by film manufacturers and intended as a safe film base replacement for unstable and highly ...
and other issues.
The most requested images from the Archive include
Colin Firth
Colin Andrew Firth (born 10 September 1960) is an English actor and producer. He was identified in the mid-1980s with the " Brit Pack" of rising young British actors, undertaking a challenging series of roles, including leading roles in '' A M ...
in ''
Pride and Prejudice
''Pride and Prejudice'' is an 1813 novel of manners by Jane Austen. The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreci ...
'',
Michael Parkinson
Sir Michael Parkinson (born 28 March 1935) is an English broadcaster, journalist and author. He presented his television talk show '' Parkinson'' from 1971 to 1982 and from 1998 to 2007, as well as other talk shows and programmes both in the U ...
interviewing
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali (; born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer and activist. Nicknamed "The Greatest", he is regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century, a ...
,
Martin Bashir
Martin Henry Bashir (born 19 January 1963) is a British journalist. He was a presenter on British and American television and for the BBC's ''Panorama'' programme, for which he interviewed Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995. Although the intervie ...
interviewing
Diana, Princess of Wales
Diana, Princess of Wales (born Diana Frances Spencer; 1 July 1961 – 31 August 1997) was a member of the British royal family. She was the first wife of King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) and mother of Princes William and Harry. Her ac ...
and a picture of
Delia Derbyshire
Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 – 3 July 2001) 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 ...
at work in the Radiophonic workshop at the BBC.
Archive Treasure Hunt
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. 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.
The resolution of this appeal was that over one hundred productions were recovered including ''
The Men from the Ministry
''The Men from the Ministry'' is a British radio comedy series broadcast by the BBC between 1962 and 1977, starring Wilfrid Hyde-White, Richard Murdoch and, from 1966, when he replaced Hyde-White, Deryck Guyler. Written and produced by Edward ...
'', ''
Something To Shout About'', ''
Man and Superman
''Man and Superman'' is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to a call for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. ''Man and Superman'' opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London ...
'', ''
The Doctor's Dilemma'', ''
I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again
''I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again'' (often abbreviated as ''ISIRTA'') was a BBC radio comedy programme that originated from the 1964 Cambridge University Footlights revue, '' Cambridge Circus''. This is a scripted sketch show. It had a devote ...
'', ''
Hancock's Half Hour
''Hancock's Half Hour'' was a BBC radio comedy, and later television comedy series, broadcast from 1954 to 1961 and written by Galton and Simpson, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The series starred Tony Hancock, with Sid James, Sidney James; the r ...
'', ''
I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue'', and ''
The Ronnie Corbett Thing
Ronald Balfour Corbett (4 December 1930 – 31 March 2016) was a Scottish actor, broadcaster, comedian and writer. He had a long association with Ronnie Barker in the BBC television comedy sketch show ''The Two Ronnies''. He achieved promine ...
'' in addition to recording sessions with
Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight; 25 March 1947) is a British singer, pianist and composer. Commonly nicknamed the "Rocket Man" after his 1972 hit single of the same name, John has led a commercially successful career a ...
,
Ringo Starr
Sir Richard Starkey (born 7 July 1940), known professionally as Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer, songwriter and actor who achieved international fame as the drummer for the Beatles. Starr occasionally sang lead vocals with the ...
and
Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is an American musician, singer, songwriter and actor whose career has spanned six decades. He is one of the most acclaimed songwriters in popular music, both as a solo artist and as half of folk roc ...
.
In addition, the Peter Sellers Estate Collection donated numerous recordings featuring
Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers (born Richard Henry Sellers; 8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980) was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence performing in the BBC Radio comedy series ''The Goon Show'', featured on a number of hit comic songs ...
.
Creative Archive Licence
The BBC together with the
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute (BFI) is a film and television charitable organisation which promotes and preserves film-making and television in the United Kingdom. The BFI uses funds provided by the National Lottery to encourage film production, ...
, the
Open University
The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...
,
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...
and
Teachers' TV formed a collaboration, named the Creative Archive Licence Group, to create a copyright licence for the re-release of archived material.
The Licence was a trial, launched in 2005, and notable for the re-release of part of the
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...
' archive and programmes made by the
BBC Natural History Unit
The BBC Studios Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of BBC Studios that produces television, radio and online content with a natural history or wildlife theme. It is best known for its highly regarded nature documentaries, including '' ...
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
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...
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.
The trial ended in 2006 following a review by the BBC Trust
The BBC Trust was the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) between 2007 and 2017. It was operationally independent of BBC management and external bodies, and its stated aim was to make decisions in the best interests of ...
and works released under the licence were withdrawn.[
]
Voices from the Archives
Voices from the Archives was a former BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
project, launched in partnership with