000727 RFI Digital Radio Capture and Data Extraction

The Library is inviting potential vendors to provide information and propose options and business solutions for the provision of a Digital Radio Capture and Data Extraction solution.

The British Library sees this RFI process as one potential route to inform in the procurement of such services and fulfil the requirements described below.

The information gathered under this RFI may be used to evaluate potential suppliers and products to produce a shortlist for invitation to tender or procurement via a government framework agreement.

At this stage, no final decision has been taken on the precise procurement route to be followed.

When submitting information, all organisations should note that this is not currently a tender opportunity, but is part of a market consultation exercise to ensure that the procurement route selected and the options ultimately developed for any procurement are properly informed.

The National Radio Archive project is one of the three major strands of the Save our Sounds programme (2015-2023).

The aim of Save our Sounds is to preserve the UK's national sound collection and ensure that future audio production is properly identified, captured, preserved and made accessible.

Save our Sounds is one element of the British Library's Living Knowledge suite of programmes that are fundamental to the Library's future development, leading up to its fiftieth anniversary in 2023.

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

The current radio collection comprises over 200,000 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 10,000 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.

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 (focusing on 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.

This RFI is intended to identify particular areas that will help us build the digital radio archive in its pilot stage.

We need to know what technologies and/or services might be suitable, what the likely costs of their implementation might be, and how their implementation in a pilot could be developed into a long-term research service.