At the British Library we are in the middle of a major programme entitled Save our Sounds, which I’ve mentioned before. Its goal is to to preserve the nation’s sound heritage, or at least a good proportion of it. Much of the programme is concentrated on historical sounds, too often held on formats at riskRead More
In the Rio 2016 gold medal bout of the 80kg taekwondo between Lutalo Muhammad of Great Britain and Cheick Sallah Cisse of Ivory Coast, Muhammad was ahead on points with one second to go. In one second he would win the gold. The clock had been stopped while the athletes got once more into position.Read More
Returning (a little later than planned) to this occasional series on useful online resources, here’s a listing of newspaper archives. I happen to work at one of the world’s largest newspaper archives, where we have digitised some 14 million pages on the British Newspaper Archive, with many more millions to come. But this is aRead More
Watching a BBC television programme on the history of the UK and the European Union the other night (Europe: Them or Us), I noted the great amount of archive footage used and how skilfully it had been woven into the argument. I looked, as I always do on such occasions, at the credits, to seeRead More
I went to the cinema this afternoon to see Spotlight, and I was very impressed. It is fully deserving of its Academy Award. It is not only a gripping, sobering account of priestly child abuse in Boston, but champions the noble practice of investigative journalism, highlighting the best of newspapers at a time when theRead More
This is the text of a blog post on the archiving of news which I wrote recently for the British Library’s Newsroom blog. Wherever possible – or wherever it interests me – I’m reproducing texts here which have been written on other platforms. The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are toRead More
This is the text of the talk I gave on 29 January 2016 at the Institute of Historical Research’s Winter Conference. The theme of the conference was ‘The Production of the Archive‘, and I was asked to say something about sound and/or moving image archives in a section of the day called ‘Beyond text andRead More
It’s well known how vast YouTube is, and the rate at which it is growing. Recent figures suggest that 400 hours of video are added to the site every minute (back in 2013 it was a mere 100 hours per minute), and that it is serving some six billion video views per day. It isRead More
The obituaries for the late David Nobbs have all concentrated on the television series that he wrote, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79). This was inevitable. It’s the work of his with which most people in Britain around at the time will be familiar, and it bequeathed to posterity a number of catchphrasesRead More
‘A million minutes of filmed history’ – someone in the communications team of the AP Archive must have been mightily pleased when they came up with that tag line for promoting their release online of the entire British Movietone newsreel archive onto YouTube. For that is what the have done. Apparently every story from everyRead More