From The Archives

The BBC has launched the BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource, providing schools, colleges and universities across the UK access to hundreds of BBC television and radio broadcasts of Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and documentaries about Shakespeare. The collection has been developed in response to BBC Director-General Tony Hall’s ambitious plans, announced in 2013, to digitise the BBC’s extensive Shakespeare archive with the aim of making it available to those in formal education and learning in the UK.

The material, which dates from the 1950s, includes the first British televised adaptations of Othello and Henry V; classic interviews with key Shakespearean actors including John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Laurence Olivier; and more than 1,000 stills of Shakespeare productions and performers.

The BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource builds on the work of the Research and Education Space (RES), a partnership project between Jisc, the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) and the BBC, that aims to make it easier for UK teachers, students and academics to discover, access and use material held in the public collections of broadcasters, museums, libraries, galleries and publishers. The BBC has built an underlying platform that can organise and index the archive collections of public sector institutions. This can then be used by developers and companies to develop products for use in the UK’s educational establishments.

Shakespeare Touchtable – complied by Garry Campbell

An interactive map will be installed at the Library of Birmingham, bringing Shakespeare’s world to life on a large touchtable that lets visitors explore the life, times and works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in a new and innovative way. It features clips of well-known interpreters of Shakespeare including Helen Mirren, Orson Welles and Peter Hall, as well as historic documents and information about theatres and the locations of Shakespeare’s plays.

The touchtable is a collaboration between BBC Birmingham, BBC Archive Development, the Library of Birmingham, the University of Birmingham Digital Humanities Hub and the University of Birmingham Shakespeare Institute, including archive from the BBC, the Shakespeare Institute and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.