We Tell Ourselves Stories
Pictured: Delia Derbyshire, an electronic music pioneer who worked in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radiophonic Workshop and wrote the Dr Who Theme music.
Being Controller of Archive Development at the Ö÷²¥´óÐã has given me the opportunity to explore not just our own extensive archives of TV and radio programmes, photographs, documents and old records but also introduced me to the world of museums, libraries and archives, many of which we are working with as part of the wider digital public space initiative.
While a great deal of our activity is necessarily technical and procedural, concerned with digitisation standards, rights models, data modelling and the myriad other details that will allow us to make more Ö÷²¥´óÐã material available to more people, I've also had the opportunity to think deeply about the role of archives and 'memory institutions' in our lives.
I drew on this when writing my speech for a recent conference, 'Telling History' that took place in Turin as part of the 63rd , the oldest and perhaps the most prestigious acknowledgement of expertise of broadcasters in radio, television and - since 1998 - the web.
The long history of the Prix Italia gave me an excuse to look at the way the role of broadcasters has changed over the years, and I suggested that the archives that we have all accumulated over the decades have turned us into memory institutions just like the museums, galleries and libraries that normally get labelled with that term, and that it is time for us to acknowledge this and build it into the way we work.
given by Tony Ageh at the 63rd Prix Italia conference.
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