Last week I attended a couple of the curator sessions which formed part of our social science doctoral training day. One of the sessions was by Dr Luke McKernan, our Moving Image Curator. The collections he looks after, and services he has developed, offer incredible potential to researchers across the social sciences and I wanted to briefly highlight some of them here.

Many people may not realise that the British Library holds moving image material, but in fact there are over 55,000 items in our collections, including ethnographic videos, documentaries and 14,000 music videos. These resources are available to access via our listening and viewing service and can be found through our main catalogue.

 

Dr Luke McKernan speaks about the new Broadcast News service

There is a new service which could add significant value to social science research, particularly that which undertakes discourse analysis on news sources as part of its methodology. The British Library Broadcast News service provides access to television and radio news programmes from seventeen channels which have been broadcast in the UK since May 2010. Forty-six hours are recorded per day and they are almost immediately available to watch in our reading rooms. Many of the programmes recorded come with subtitles, which we have been able to use to provide a word-search function. This will allow you to find news programmes relevant to your research as well as particular moments within those programmes which will be of interest to you.

The channels we record include: BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, Al-Jazeera English, NHK World, CNN, France 24, Bloomberg, Russia Today and China's CCTV News.

Luke McKernan has more relevant information about this service, and other moving image services on his blog. He is currently investigating speech-to-text technology and how this will enable us to make even more moving image and sound collection fully searchable. You can read more about this process here.

Other resources

Tom Hulme, our ESRC intern, has written a case study about using Broadcast News at the British Library. Read it here.