"I finished today thinking that this is one of the treasures of the world and a global resource deserves global recognition. Any citizen of the world can find something relevant to them in this material. This is a history of the world speaking to the world. …It's an amazing, amazing resource. It's as versatile as the person who asks it questions."
- Nick Cull, University of Southern California
The BBC Monitoring Service was established in 1939 and was initially accommodated near Evesham, Worcestershire, but later moved to Caversham, near Reading, where it remains today. The Service played a key role throughout the Second World War and Cold War era by providing the BBC, as well as the government with information about what was being broadcast on the airwaves by countries across the world.
In 2015 Imperial War Museums received a research networking grant of £32,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to examine the academic potential of the transcripts of the broadcasts monitored between 1939-1982 (the BBC Monitoring Collection).
Suzanne Bardgett, IWM's Head of Research and Academic Partnerships, was the Principal Investigator of the research network and you can read her blog on how the network came into being here.
The collection consists of some 15 million pages of typed transcripts, the raw, unedited documents transcribed from live radio broadcasts. There is also the working index, 'Monitoring Reports' and 'Daily Digests of World Broadcasts' – the summaries that were circulated to BBC journalists and government departments, as well as media outlets. The network was the first major initiative to investigate this vast and largely unexplored asset.
The AHRC networking grant allowed researchers to suggest potential approaches, that can further understanding of key themes in world history. From 2015 to early 2016 the network held five workshops, bringing together current and former BBC Monitoring staff, users of the service including diplomats, government specialists and journalists, industry practitioners from equivalent overseas agencies and leading international academics.
The research workshops addressed the following themes:
Sara Beck: “BBC Monitoring played a crucial role in the reporting of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, important moments in international news, and we did this by monitoring press reports, radio, TV bulletins, the traditional media, if you like. These days, we're as likely to be following social media postings by jihadist sympathisers to piece together what's happening in northern Syria, or it was BBC Monitoring which spotted a Ukrainian news agency alert that the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was missing. And we then tracked the various tweets and deleted tweets as the focus moved to find out who had shot down the plane, so we were ahead of the game in terms of breaking the news but as it turned out, those tweets were the crucial source of information on that tragic story. So, we're watching the media every day, all around the world in over 100 languages. So, we know more than most just how much the media has changed and continues to change. There's been an explosion of digital and social sources onto our monitoring landscape and we're acutely aware of the need to adapt our work, how we need to develop new technologies to help us deal with this level of change and how our success will depend on how effectively we can respond to this shifting media environment to the way people consume information and manipulate their technology. So the challenge we now face at BBC Monitoring is how do we combine the power of our history, the value our users in the BBC and the UK Government place on our service with the changes we need to make to ensure we have a modern, relevant, high quality service that's got a sustainable future.”
Sara Beck, Director of BBC Monitoring, talking about the important role that Monitoring continues to play in following international events.
Further information
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Partners
The BBC Monitoring Collection AHRC Research Network was a collaborative project which aimed to engage with numerous academic disciplines and institutions.
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