Cosmic Quest
July 7th, 2008 by Steve BowbrickHere’s a particularly egregious example of the wastefulness of the BBC’s programme archiving policy. Heather Couper’s marvelous Cosmic Quest is a thirty-part series about the history of astronomy that’s been going out over the last six weeks on Radio 4: a top dollar resource for enthusiasts, educators and the generally curious. The first twenty-five episodes of the series have been thrown away already and you’re going to have to get your skates on if you want to hear the last five because they too will have been overwritten by the end of this week.
I know this is more a sin of omission than of commission—that’s just the way the automated archiving set-up works. I also know that there’ll be some rights issues here (I imagine Couper herself has plans for further exploitation of the series and BBC Wordwide probably has an option to repackage the shows) but I believe that it’s essentially a kind of public service vandalism to commission such powerful stuff and not to create a permanent home for it online where licence fee-payers, schools, parents and the rest can get at it.
The optimal location for a content asset like this, created using public funds for use by the British public, is in a public place like the BBC’s web site. Any other use of this asset will, inevitably, under-utilise it (even if thousands can be persuaded to buy it on CD or in book form) and the BBC’s purpose here ought to be to make the best possible use of it by sharing it as widely as possible.
So, enough with the whinging. Here’s the final episode, about the search for extraterrestrial life. You can listen to an omnibus edition of the last week’s shows here for the time being and, I notice, the whole series seems to be knocking around the torrentsphere in chunks of various sizes if you’re that way inclined.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
[...] had a bit of a whinge over at Speechification earlier on about the BBC’s content archiving policy. I find it [...]
July 8th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
[...] Inte bara länkar till radioprogram utan även debatt om radio, som ett välskriven påhopp på BBC:s idiotiska arkiveringspolicy (lika illa som SR), gör det här till en mycket läsvärd blogg. Förtjänar väl värd sin plats [...]
July 9th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I could not agree more. If it were not for Speechification, I would listen to hardly any BBC content. The BBC should archive podcasts for listening in perpetuity.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I want to agree with Steve’s post - I’m a physics teacher and I’ve desperately been trying to scrape together the complete series. I’d never thought to check “the torrentsphere” and sure enough, it’s there; but I shouldn’t have to resort to BitTorrent. Cosmic Quest has no long-lasting commercial value to the BBC - *why not* put it on line for all and sundry?
July 12th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Well, I agree that it was a great series, but it suffers from the same problem as much BBC science output: It is full of brain-washing stuff about science being the answer to everything, and the fact that most people are disillusioned with science is not acknowledged. Then it attacks those who believe in God or the Bible as if only a tiny nutty minority of licence-payers believed in God. The stuff about life on other planets seems like a desperate attempt to put God out of business by finding life elsewhere in the galaxy - as if that would make any difference to the existence of God.
December 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Am I wrong in thinking that if public funds have paid for the production of a show/podcast and also pay for the archive of produced output, surely the archives should be made freely available. I find it more than a little bit annoying that the BBC Radio site advises me of the existence & content of a show, tells me when it was broadcast, but does not provide access.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:34 am
hi man!