Learning on ScreenHerding Elephants – Radio and the British Library
The British Library and its predecessor institutions for sound have been home to the UK’s national radio collection for over fifty years. Of course there are other significant radio archives (notably the BBC) and access services (the BUFVC), but the Library’s role as the national archive for radio is widely acknowledged. Through a combination of off-air recording since the early 1960s and selective acquisition from over two hundred donors (radio stations, producers, musicians and radio enthusiasts) we’ve amassed an onsite radio collection of nearly 200,000 hours ranging from the 1920s to the present day.
In addition, the Library’s Listening & Viewing Service in London also provides onsite listening access to the extensive collections of the BBC Sound Archive, bringing the total volume of available recordings to around 450,000 hours – 50 years of uninterrupted listening if you wanted to hear it all.
… the radio collections are a record of changing notions of archiving and of the cultural and historical value of broadcast media
This dual radio access service is complemented, as you might expect within a national library, by a third element: the UK’s most comprehensive collection of literature and non-audio media relating to broadcasting, including a near complete collection of original BBC Radio and Television news scripts from 1938 through to the 1990s.
The radio collections are a record not just of the changing nature of broadcasting since the 1920s, but of changing notions of archiving and of the cultural and historical value of broadcast media since that time. When the Library’s predecessor institution for sound (the British Institute of Recorded Sound) first began recording off-air in the early 1960s, UK radio consisted of only a handful of stations, so the majority of what was archived derived from the BBC’s national network: the predecessors of Radios 2, 3 and 4.
The changing face of radio archiving. Paul Wilson holds a pair of hard drives containing more than 62,000 hours of Resonance FM MP3 transmission since 2002. In contrast the shelves behind hold only hold around 2,000 hours of broadcast quality analogue stereo audio. Today more than five times this volume – 10,000 hours of radio – is being transmitted across the UK daily and the bulk of it is unlikely to be saved long-term.
Today there’s also a growing collection of independent and commercial radio content. Major collections of Capital Radio and LBC news and current affairs programming (much of the latter now accessible via the BUFVC website) are complemented by more selective collections of commercial radio from around the UK. More recently, the Library has taken the entire ‘born-digital’ archive of one of the UK’s first and most radical community radio stations – London’s acclaimed Resonance FM.
