Collection guides

About the collection

Our Broadcast News service records and delivers access to television and radio news programmes from 31 channels receivable free-to-air in the UK. Recordings began officially on 6 May 2010. There are now over 175,000 programmes available, with around 60 hours added each day, available immediately after broadcast.

We currently record from the following channels:

Television: Al Jazeera English, BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC Parliament, Channel 4, Channels 24, CNN, CCTV News, Euronews, France 24, ITV1, NHK World, RT, Sky News

Radio: BBC London, BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4, BBC Five Live, BBC World Service, LBC, talkSport

We have an extensive general radio collection comprising some 350,000 hours of UK and international radio, from the 1920s to the present day.

What is available online?

What is available in our Reading Rooms?

British Library users can search for and view the programmes in the Newsroom, or in any Reading Room at a terminal where headphones are provided. Innovative searching across subtitles, where these are available, makes the news programmes word-searchable and opens them up to a wide range of research enquiries. Owing to copyright restrictions you are not permitted to make copies or to take away extracts, and we are unable to provide online access to the collection.

We have made more extensive recordings of major breaking news stories, such at the London riots of 2011, the Japanese tsunami, and the death of Nelson Mandela.