Infrequent Nights

I've recently turned myself on to the CBC archives: archives.cbc.ca. I applaud the CBC for actually utilizing the potential of the internet in this useful and well-designed web page. I was doing a bit of reading up on the Chinese diaspora in Canada and ended up at their archival timeline: archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-69-1433/life_society/chinese_immigration/. While there isn't much there I've not read in other places, it is great to be able to watch contemporary news reports about an historical topic of interest. Furthermore the site allows you to not only chart the changes within the Chinese Canadian community, but to see how they have been perceived by the mainstream media and how those perceptions have changed over time. Just click the little 'timeline' at the top and you're offered all of the clips available. The clips have background information available in a handy little box beside them, and are well arranged. There are hundreds of these timelines available, and the archives are highly searchable allowing users to view a timeline of all archived material available on the web separated by category. Timelines with similar topics are hyperlinked together, and it is all linked to Radio-Canada's French archive site.

I love this site, all I want is more material. I want older radio archives up there. I want more archived news footage. In my dream world I want to click on a calendar and see a news broadcast from any day of any year since the CBC has been in existence. And there is no reason they can't give me my dream world. All that is required is a lot of storage space, significant bandwidth, and some people to digitize the content and get it up on the web.