The Media School

The LBC/IRN Audio Archive Digitisation Project

The Independent Radio News/London Broadcasting Company radio archive consists of 7,000 reel-to-reel tapes in a collection that runs from 1973 to the mid-1990s. It is the most important commercial radio archive in the UK and provides a unique audio history of the period.

This project focuses on the most noteworthy content – approximately 4,000 hours of recordings relating to news and current affairs. The archive to be digitised contains invaluable recordings of a wide range of broadcasts including coverage of the Falklands war, the miners' strike, Northern Ireland, the whole of the Thatcher period of government and recordings of the first hour of UK commercial radio including the first commercial radio news bulletin.

Users will be able to access the recordings via a website which combines access to the archive catalogue and digital audio files.

The project

Commercial radio in Britain was launched in October 1973 when Independent Radio News (IRN) and its sister organisation, the London Broadcasting Company (LBC) were granted their licences. A joint LBC/IRN archive of programmes and news items was established and this, together with its catalogue, constitutes the archive in its current form. It forms an important part of the history of radio broadcasting since it provides an alternative source of radio journalism and news and current affairs broadcasts to the BBC’s own collection, but in its current form the archive is inaccessible for research.

This project will conserve in digital form as much of the news and current affairs in the archive as possible and place the material within a teaching and research environment where it can be exploited for future knowledge. One of the most significant developments in the field of media and communications studies (including journalism, broadcasting and cultural studies) has been the growing interest in history and archives. Making archived programme material, together with searchable databases, available online has major implications for learning, teaching and research across the humanities curriculum.

The content

The archive comprises approximately 7,000 mainly reel-to-reel audio tapes covering the period 1973 to 1995 (when digital storage was introduced). Examples of archived programmes to be digitised include:

The live reporting of UK election results from five general elections, giving a unique sense of the political shaping of the country, in particular the Thatcher years
Extraordinary material relating to the conduct of the Falklands war
The whole of the Decision Makers series 1974-86: weekly 30-minute programmes of political and current affairs analysis which provide a unique insight into politics and its reportage within the UK at the time
Significant material relating to the ending of apartheid in South Africa, including State President PW Botha’s speech at the opening of the South African parliament in which he announced that the era of apartheid was over. There is also accompanying political and journalistic analysis of this event.

The process

The project will transfer approximately 4,000 hours of the news and current affairs contents of 7,000 quarter inch reel-to-reel audio tapes to a digital format.

The profiling of content for delivery over the web to UK HE will be managed and implemented by BUFVC⁴, which has extensive experience in working with digital moving image and sound and associated metadata. The project will be supported by a catalogue containing metadata taken from the packaging of the tapes and, if necessary, by listening to tapes, and from the card and computer indexes saved by BournemouthUniversity. The catalogue metadata will be profiled and delivered by the BUFVC.

An initial lead website will deal with learning and teaching issues and will include a blog, exemplars of good practice, advice on using audio in teaching and learning, tools and innovative applications.

The future

LBC / IRN have offered access to the current digital archive and broadcast feed. If this project is successful in building a robust infrastructure we have the option of feeding into it other broadcast material.

The project also has two allied areas of content in digital form. The Independent Local Radio Programme Sharing Archive, and the South Central Local Radio Project. A further project would be to implement a federated search interface that was capable of cross-searching these resources, including the LBC / IRN material to create an augmented resource covering independent radio in the whole of the UK.