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30 August 2022

British Library Television News Programme-Level List

Following on from our recent announcement of a complete title-level downloadable listing of all newspapers catalogued by the British Library, we now have a downloadable listing of all our television news programmes, available from today on our Research Repository.

Broadcast News service

British Library's Broadcast News Service with programmes for 30 August 2022

The British Library Television News Programme-Level List provides a programme-level record of all television news and current affairs programmes recorded by the British Library’s Broadcast News service between March 2010 and May 2022. All of the channels featured were receivable free-to-air in the UK and licensed by Ofcom. All of the programmes listed can be accessed in the British Library’s reading rooms via the Broadcast News service.

There are 114,380 programmes listed, each with record number, programme title, series title, description, publisher/broadcaster, production date and duration. It should be noted that for many of the programmes we only have a generic description (e.g. "The latest national and international news"), though there are plenty of programmes with meaningful descriptions, including some tagged under themes such as Coronavirus, Donald Trump and Ukraine Conflict. The subtitles that we capture with when we record television news programmes are not included in the list.

The channels features, with their dates of recordings held, are:

Channel Recording dates
Al Jazeera English 06/05/2010– ongoing
Arirang TV HD 16/03/2022- ongoing
BBC One London 06/05/2010– ongoing
BBC News 06/05/2010– ongoing
BBC Parliament 01/06 2010– ongoing
BBC Two 06/05/2010– ongoing
BBC Four 04/06/2010– ongoing
BBC Scotland 05/03/2019- ongoing
Bloomberg TV 01/06/2010– 30/06/2016
CGTN 31/12/2016 – 04/02/2021
Channel 4 06/05/2010– ongoing
Channel 5 29/03/2010-17/06/2010, 16/04/2018-07/01/2020
Channels 24 02/11/2015– ongoing
CNN 06/05/2010– ongoing
CCTV News 22/02/2012– 30/12/2016
Euronews 07/05/2010–21/03/2011, 05/06/2017 - ongoing
France 24 English 29/05/2010– ongoing
ITV1 London 06/05/2010– ongoing
GB News 13/06/2021- ongoing
NHK World 21/06/2010– 30/09/2011
NHK World HD 06/10/2011– ongoing
RT (Russia Today) 01/06/2010– 02/03/2022
Sky News 02/06/2010– ongoing
TalkTV HD 25/04/2022- ongoing
TRT World 08/01/2020- ongoing

The listing is available in Excel spreadsheet down and can be downloaded under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain licence. The DOI is https://doi.org/10.23636/jcbr-7v17.

This is part of our growing collection of freely-available news datasets, all available under the News Datasets section of the Research Repository. Until now, we have added on newspaper and press directory data to the Repository.In adding television, we are demonstrating the multi-media approach to our collecting of the nation's news. Radio and Web news must follow.

We hope that researchers will find interesting uses for the Television News Programme-Level List and welcome any feedback.

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