by Derek Morrison, 9 January 2010
The BBC’s Radio 4 transmits the 10 minute programme A Point of View which they describe as “a weekly reflection on a topical issue”. The 8 January 2010 reflection was on ebooks and offered by Lisa Jardine under the title A Page Turning Passion. The transcript and MP3 download are worth a read/listen but you had better not delay. As a public service broadcaster I do wish the BBC would mimic the US NPR programme On the Media and maintain a long term archive of transcripts/audio downloads – 7 days is a nonsense for material like this.
Lisa Jardine is an established broadcaster, author, and academic historian. She is Director of the AHRB Research Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; she is an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.
There is an archive for Point of View: go to the programme’s home page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qng8 , and then click on the archive ‘by year’. Transcripts are also available (I’ve just listened to the ebook programme, which cut off the last line of the talk, but tracked down what LJ was saying via the transcript).
Thanks for the heads up Andrew … Yes there is an audio archive of many the programmes but the transcript appears to be limited to the latest transmission only. That’s a bit strange because the storage overhead for text is so low. Maybe this is just a BBC oversight or am I missing something? I also think that NPR’s “On the Media” is a model of interface/presentation consistency that the BBC could learn form. A case in point is a “Point of View” which has a variety of presentations depending on how you access it, e.g. the transcript for the programme being presented as part of the BBC’s News Magazine thus detaching it from the overall context to which it belongs.