000727 Digital Radio Archive Management System

The Library is recognised as the home of the nation's radio archive.

The current radio collection comprises around 250,000 hours.

Additionally, via a longstanding arrangement with the BBC the Library also provides the only UK point of research access to the extensive radio collections of the BBC Archives.

However, of the estimated 3m hours of radio broadcast in the UK each year from c.700 stations, the Library is capturing a mere 15,000 hours (mostly news-based content).

It is estimated that 92% of current UK radio is not being properly preserved, with only 2% being made available for potential research post-transmission.

The minimum requirements for a successful pilot will be to deliver a capture and management solution for AV broadcast media, which will enable the British Library to record off-air between 12 and 18 hours per channel, per day, from a combination of national and local radio stations from across UK (up to 300,000 hours per year); to preserve these recordings in the British Library's Digital Library System; and to make them accessible (with published and derived metadata) through British Library access systems.

To address this situation we plan to create a digital radio archive, based on off-air recording, which will preserve a proportion of ongoing UK radio output (emphasising speech-based content), and make this available for research.

The first step is to build a pilot radio archive over a period of two years, covering up to 50 stations from across the UK, to be developed thereafter into a full service.

The pilot will test technologies, scalability, sustainability, research use and integration with British Library systems.