A NEW LIBRARY

Radio Record, Volume IX, Issue 15, 18 October 1935, Page 5

A NEW LIBRARY

THE British Broadcasting Corporation has recently added another to its unique collection of librar-ies-a library in which are collected the records that ° already possess historical interest, as well as many that will undoubtedly gain that interest in years to come. This library should be of value to the whole Empire, and we hope that the time is not far distant when the © New Zealand Broadcasting Board will see fit to add such a library-both recordings of New Zealand events and copies of the B.B.C.’s recordings-to its own services. Growing steadily and continuously, the B.B.C."s library is now being built up with a dual purpose; to cater for the immediate needs of special broadcasts, and to preserve records of personalities and: events that will form the material for future broadcasts. And it may well be in the first rather than in the second of these categories that posterity will find the really significant memorial of this age. Records of the voices of great men and women, of speeches made on‘ historic occasions, will always have a-vivid interest, but they are after all only memorials of things that history will preserve in many other ways. Among the records of ordinary life and activity, however, 1s being built up a picture that could hardly be presented in any other way. Records of racecourses and fairs, of railwaymen and shipwrights and holiday crowds, are preserving the most intangible things, things that fade from our memories as the pattern of life leaves them imperceptibly behind. It may be that the most important thing the records preserve will be the thing that eludes historians and that no research can lay bare: the authentic accents _of the common man.