BBC's Record library (vinyl)

[darren70]

I realize that this website is dedicated to lost programmes, but there must be someone reading this who knows the answer to this question. The BBC's Gramophone library was always reputed to be the largest in the world and supposably housed some very rare pressings. Now that most of the Corp's radio stations have been digitized in terms of production and indeed many of the shows have now employed outside production houses, is the BBC record library still intact?

[Gary C]

it certainly is still intact. But the Gram Library only houses commercially released vinyl, not radio programmes

[darren70]

Many thanks for the reply-that is reassuring, and I hope it will remain so as a complete collection (I wonder if their curates are still adding to the collection?). On the same subject, when Thames TV lost their broadcasting franchase about 15/16 years ago, I went to their record library sale which I found extremely fascinating to see these mint pressings.

[Koen Br]

How intact is "intact"? I remember reading about the cleaning up of the soundtrack of a BBC TV programme which was due to be released on DVD (Quatermass?); to get something better than the 16 mm audio track, they wanted to go back to the actual record the music originally came from, but it wasn't in the library anymore. It was a 78, I think (so not vinyl) - is there a different policy for 33 and 78 rpm's?

[Simon Mclean]

A considerable amount (possibly all?) of the BBC TV gram library vinyl's been sold off - I've got some of it upstairs!

The Beeb also sold several thousand 7" singles to Reckless Records in Berwick Street, and a few oddities and obscurities have been turned up in that lot. This all appeared to be stuff from the TV library too.

[lfbarfe]

Simon said:

The Beeb also sold several thousand 7" singles to Reckless Records in Berwick Street, and a few oddities and obscurities have been turned up in that lot. This all appeared to be stuff from the TV library too.

There were some from the general gram library in that sale, from which I benefited too. As far as I could gather at the time, these were duplicate copies which were no longer needed as vinyl material, when requested, now tended to be sent out as a CD-R dub.