The British Broadcast Corporation moved its first steps in the early 1920s when the radio industry started to develop. The BBC is the oldest national broadcast organization and the biggest by number of employee and has evolved since the first post war period reaching the television and the internet. [1]
So the aim of the website www.bbc.co.uk/archives is to let the present day audience rediscover the old programs and the best records and videos. The site also contains photos and documents related to the interviewed characters or directly to the BBC. It is an independent project completely financed by the BBC itself.
The online archives are focused on the British audience and actually a great number of recording are not available for non-UK residents; in fact the project is lacking a bit of openness towards a broader audience and is slightly British-centric. Of course the fact that the selection of the archived material displayed is UK related is pretty normal for a national broadcast corporation; however the BBC has had for decades an international audience and it means so much for a lot of people around the world especially since World War II. The website bbc.archive.co.uk in itself is not very Europe oriented however the BBC is collaborating with other European projects as Eusceen.eu providing material for their online platform.
The online version of the British audiovisual archive was a good alternative to the physical archives of the company that were, and still are, not equipped and set up for visitors and in which only part of the material is accessible to the public. The bbc/archives.com is one of the many digitization projects done for preservation purposes and openness to a wider audience. However the BBC’s archives are somewhat different and more important because of the impact the Radio has had on so many people and it has in some cases shaped their lives and daily routine.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC (accessed on 23/11/2014); http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/resources/in-depth/local_radio.shtml (accessed on 23/11/2014)