fuck.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ is going down soon, due to their budget. Its teh internet, it should be free forever!11111!!!
fuck.
Wait, what? Ok, so I will still be able to to read Doctor Who novels online, the only part I really see of it. Still, this must suck for all two of the Blake’s Seven fans.
Preach it, brother! It’s high time we brought back slavery!
A corporation cannot be enslaved. It can, however, be coerced like a motherfuck.
Explain how taking content off the internet is “destruction of archive material.” The material will still exist. It just won’t currently be accessible to you.
BBC Online and Radio 4 are the only services worth the licences fee IMO.
As a professional archivist, I would like to second this request, because the thread title’s implications (and I’ve actually visited the BBC archives) and the OP’s whining seem worlds apart to me.
. First, I thought that the line sounded nice. It was shortened from a similar one, in the Slashdot article I found out about this. Now, personally, for my volunteer hours before I graduated high school, I worked with an archivist with a local museum, so believe me, I know a little about archiving.
Now, the problem is, I am also a Doctor Who fan. I would like to think that the BBC will take the contents of the web pages, put an exact copy onto storage material, and put another copy, modified for local machine access into hard drives, and put still another copy into a faraday cage, but as I said, I am a fan of Doctor Who.
What did the Beeb do with old copies of the program, in the beginning of the show? Why, destroyed them, of course. Who will ever care about these shows, in thirty years? Thus, many, many copies of the show are no longer available to any one. Period. While I would like to believe they have learned from the past, this, and many other experiences tell me that many people, and organizations do not. Thus, I fear that the web page maintainers will simply erase the server’s hard drives, and store info on Soap Operas, instead.
I’m talking about the people who will work for no wages so that Scott can have his free content. It is they who will be the slaves.
As you might have noticed, I did not take my original comment, re: “teh interweb should be free forever!” seriously. However, I should point out that this is in regards to England, where people willingly (mostly) pay a Television licensing fee to support services like these. Not quite the same as an american tax plan. I will thank to not to compare the two, or interject your problem with american taxes.
The majority of the run of the second Doctor, Patrick Traughton, no longer exists because of this.
This also affects some of the storylines of the first doctor as well. Reconstructions have been made using audiotapes created by home audiophiles with still pictures.
I don’t think Scott’s concern is unjustified.
The BBC has a horrible track record with archiving their material.
Okay, thanks for the explanation. Your OP makes a lot more sense now.
The bastards are getting rid of the Science and Nature news too. It can’t be that expensive to wite half a dozen stories a day can it???
The BBC also appear to have deleted most of the Rupert Davies Maigret programmes, dating from the 60’s. Many Maigret fans (and George Simenon) reckon that these were the best ever adaptations of the famous series of police stories. I said “appear to have deleted” because nobody seems to be able to get a straight answer out of the Beeb about the fate of these programmes. In one breath they say they are safe in the archives , other times that most of them have been wiped.
The difficulty is the sheer volume of material they produce. To be sure of keeping everything that might possibly be of interest, they’d have to keep everything. And in the past that meant not just put it in a box and forget about it, but actively conserve the tapes etc. The decision had to be made to preserve some stuff properly, rather than keep everything and let it all deteriorate. And yes, inevitably some decisions were made to discard things which are now regretable.
In an archive the size of the Beeb’s, it’s quite possible that theres huge amounts which aren’t fully identifiable. There’s no room with a big sign on the door saying ‘Dr Who and Maigret, lost episodes’, that everybody’s just overlooked until now.
Even with digital content, archiving is a mammoth task, and not one that’s easy to get the finances for.
Actually, I would argue that with especially with digital content, archiving is a mammoth task.
Admittedly, much of my exposure to the issues involved with archiving materials the discussion is “paper” versus “electronic.” The downside of archiving paper is the sheer bulk of the material. The upside is that if you stick paper in a box or on a shelf and ignore it , it will still be there when you go back.*
With digital/electronic if you ignore it, it probably won’t be there if you suddenly decide you need it- or if it is you have issues of accessing it. Who can keep up with all the technology changes?
*This statement studiously ignores the realities of acid-based papers, and inkjet technology and other changes which mean that in many cases, old papers are better made and better preserved than modern papers.