Saturday 7 July 2012

Why paper archives won't disappear soon

The BBC's Click programme has a feature online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/9735727.stm which looks at the question Why tech can't break the hold of paper? It asks why with so much demand for digitised material do we still need to rely so heavily on pen and paper?

Included within the piece are some interesting revelations. Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing for the National Archives at Kew, for example, describes how the archive did a costing to see how expensive it would be to digitise its holdings, in order to reduce physical productions at the archive - it turns out that to digitise just 20% of the entire collection would have cost some £259 million. There are also glimpses of the National Archives storage facility in a salt mine in Cheshire - not quite Utah's Granite Mountain, but it doesn't need to be flash, just functional!

The whole item is just under six minutes in length. I don't know if it can only be viewed in the UK or overseas also, but it does have a BBC World Service logo at the top of the page - so fingers crossed!

(With thanks to @GuildOneName)

Chris

Check out my Scotland's Greatest Story research service www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk
New book: It's Perthshire 1866 - there's been a murder... www.thehistorypress.co.uk/products/The-Mount-Stewart-Murder.aspx (from June 12th 2012)

1 comment:

  1. FYI You can subscribe to BBC podcasts overseas, and you can get BBC radio live. I have it on lots over here in Canada. TV shows are a different matter. I have to find WDYTYA on YouTube.

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