Major Funding Preserves News Radio Archive

6 February 2007

Major funding worth over £750,000 will help Bournemouth University’s Media School to digitise and catalogue one of the most important radio news archives in the UK.

The LBC/Independent Radio News (IRN) Digitisation Project, co-ordinated by the University’s Centre for Broadcasting History, will preserve for academic use the unique news and current affairs audio archive owned by LBC Radio Ltd, part of the Chrysalis Radio Group.

The Bournemouth project joins 15 new and six established digitisation projects to be funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee).

The JISC programme represents a total investment of nearly £22m in the digitisation of high-quality online content in a wide range of media, including sound, film, images, journals, newspapers, maps, theses, pamphlets and cartoons.

The archive, currently deposited in vaults at Bournemouth University, comprises more than 7,000 audio tapes.

The tapes contain material from the very beginnings of commercial radio in Britain encompassing the joint archives of LBC and IRN (Independent Radio News).

The digitisation of the quarter-inch tape will initially cover the period from 1973 (when LBC/IRN began broadcasting) to 1995 (from which time digital storage at source was introduced).

Examples of material to be preserved are:

• The live reporting of UK election results from five general elections
• Extraordinary material relating to the conduct of the Falklands War
• Significant material relating to the ending of apartheid in South Africa, including State President PW Botha’s speech to the South African Parliament, in which he announced the ending of apartheid.

Seán Street, Professor of Radio in the Media School, and Director of the Centre for Broadcasting History Research, is understandably excited by the project.

“This collection is simply the most important commercial radio archive in the UK, and provides a unique witness to the history of the latter part of the 20th century,” Professor Street enthuses.

“The Centre is delighted to be entrusted with this highly significant project.

"We will be working with our colleagues in the BUFVC (British Universities Film & Video Council) and with other stakeholders to enable the secure preservation and educational usage of the collection for the future.

It is hard to over-estimate the importance of this project in terms of UK media history.

We will commence the digitisation process in March 2007, and the project will be completed by March 2009.”

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