Behind the scenes at the BBC Archive
There has been lots of attention on the BBC's archive over the last week or so with a flurry of blog posts from the Corporation looking at the importance of putting historically important material online, the huge size of the collection and the challenge of preserving the material.
Jemima Kiss took a tour around the facility at Windmill Road for last week's Guardian Tech Weekly podcast, talking to Richard Wright, Adrian Williams and Roly Keating.
With all that interest, it seems churlish not to plug my own archive material on the topic. In 2005 I took a tour of the facility, and blogged it as "People Don't Like Basements But Tapes Do" - A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road.
On that occasion, even though I was BBC staff at the time, I wasn't able to take any photographs inside the building. You can, though, get a look at the place in this video tour that the BBC has placed on YouTube.
You should have used your phone to take pictures... or maybe strap a secret camera on your hat?
It wasn't a public tour, it was only for BBC staff, and I think where I went wrong was in actually asking if it was OK to take pictures, rather than just start snapping away. As soon as I asked an uneasy silence descended on the group, and the person taking the tour wanted to know what I was going to use them for. I said something like "So my team can see what it is like [muffled] andmaybeonmyblog" and I just got a "probably best if you don't" in reply. At the time I had a massive bulky digital camera, so I couldn't really get away with taking photos with any subtlety. It was 5 years ago, and I was a lot less bolshy then. Now I think I would have just started taking pictures without a second thought, or at least found a way to get a couple of sneaky shots.
It'd certainly make for an entertaining video if it'd be shot on a pair of spy glasses or such like! Still, I wonder why they were quite so secretive about it?
I wish they allowed you to take pictures. It isn't possible for everyone to visit the place. But pictures speak a thousand word. Though the video has done some part of it. A bundle of images would have been really great.
I don't think they were intending to be particularly secretive about anything. The tour was being run as an open day by some of the archivists there for interested BBC staff. I suspect that they just simply weren't expecting anyone to request taking pictures, and so when asked, improvised 'no' as an answer.
Our team had an awayday at the Archives about 18 months ago. We were allowed to take pictures but were told several times that they were strictly for our own personal record and under no circumstances were we to make them public. Again, I'm not really sure what they were trying to hide (most of the pictures are of vast warehouses full of tape reels) but they were quite insistent that we shouldn't publish any photos.