Clyde Langer.

Technology Richard Wright, Senior Research Engineer Archive Research at the BBC writes on the R&D blog about inaccessible or missing data:

"An internal BBC publication is a tiny issue compared to bbc.co.uk itself, the BBC's world-class media website. BBC policy is to hold the text from bbc.co.uk in a sort-of archive, but reasons of space/budget/complexity mean that the audio and video content on bbc.co.uk is not archived. The justification is: all that audio and video goes out on radio and TV, and so gets archived separately. Has the validity of that statement been checked? How much audiovisual content is NOT also broadcast? I wish I knew! The business case to build a real archive (something with comprehensive capture, and access) was chopped and chopped until it was reduced entirely to a 90-day legal requirements system, with just a couple of access points. Meanwhile, anybody who does want to see BBC content that has been taken down from bbc.co.uk has to go to Internet Archive, where they do monthly (or thereabouts) scans of the entire internet, and make it available to all through their Wayback machine."

Apart from streaming video which only ever links back to the original source which means if you want to watch an old episode of Newsnight Review, which had been up and working perfectly well for years, but has now been pulled, you can't ...