I’ve written the article for Britain Journalism Review (BJR) on what journalists do with their paper and digital archives and what are the problems of preserving ‘the first draft of history’. It should be out in September.

I’m  following up with a natural second part to this which is: what to do about all those significant interview videos and audio tapes that are in warehouses and are historic in value. I made three Timewatchs in the 1990s with people who have never otherwise been interviewed.I interviewed at length a range of USAF (SAC), RAF and Red Air Force generals right down to pilots and then a long list of Cold War players including J K Galbraith. I would say many are of historic value and only a few minutes were actually broadcast. As Gavin McFadyen pionted out there are problems with locating the actual broadcast programmes and he believes there are lots of World in Action progs missing.

There were lots of other significant interviews in other projects I worked on. Mostly we edited in 30 – 60 seconds but there were dozens of hours of tapes. While I have transcripts in my paper archives the beta tapes are stored somewhere by the Independent TV company I was working and I suspect other journalists and film-makers have this problem. Please tell me your story:  paul.lashmar2@btinternet.com