In May I spent a week at Glasgow University attending a workshop on the curation and preservation of audio visual collections. One of the speakers was Richard Wright, the technology Manager of BBC Archives.

From his presentations it was clear that the modern BBC has a very different approach to archiving than has been the case in past years and that there has been and continues to be a considerable investment in preserving and curating both audio and visual material.

The problem of stuff that has already been dumped is obviously unsolvable - it's gone and unless off air copies reside on private shelves it's gone forever. (As an aside, in the Paul Graney archive I have a large collection of Bert Lloyd radio documentaries, some of which the BBC no longer have. Hopefully the BBC will let me stream them this year which is his birth centenary - I'm asking!).

Anyway, the problem of archiving is not just the technical side which is complex enough but also that of metadata or what's actually on the tapes. Because of the expense involved in creating metadata, it's this aspect which often defines the priorities when deciding what to digitise and what to defer. The priorities will probably be set by the assessment of how useful the content might be to present programme makers rather than it's historical value culturally within a specific genre.

On the technical side, care is being taken to identify high risk material (stuff suffering from 'sticky shed' or 'vinegar' syndromes, etc.) and make sure that vulnerable material is migrated to new media as a priority.

It's interesting to note that even stuff that HAS been digitised is considered vulnerable and the recommended period before present digitised media has to be dealt with again is only five years. Analogue media lasted a lot longer than some technical people think that digital media will last. The largest problem seems to be not just the media itself but also the systems to play it on. They rapidly go out of commission. (MiniDisk?)

Anyway Alan, I think that little material is lost from ignorance or neglect now, but the immensity of the task of migrating media and creating metadata will mean that some stuff will never see the light of day.

Keep archiving and give copies away - the more copies there are, the more we'll carry forward.

J