I really like the Reith Lectures. I’ve often found myself in the car checking the watch and wondering what excuse I could dream up for being 5 minutes late to a meeting in order to listen to the week’s lecture to the end. Of course, over the past few years it has become increasingly possible to listen at any time after the original broadcast through the BBC iplayer. But still, there’s something special about the original broadcast.

Inexorably the BBC has been improving it’s archive of Reith lectures over the past 2/3 years – almost as if it is a flagship for the emerging digital anything/anytime promise of online content. This year they’ve extended the archive even more:

You can now listen to or download more than 240 previous Reith lectures from the site. The collection includes every lecture from 1976 to 2010 and, apart from 1949 and 1950, there is at least one lecture for every year from the first in 1948. That is not all. We are building the collection of transcripts of the lectures, with only some from the late 1970s and 1980s left to add.

It’s great, it’s convenient, and it also includes transcripts for all the lectures. Of course we’ll have ‘Reith Mashups’, we’ll get ‘data mining’ to produce visualisations of the state of the (Reith) nation through the last 60 years, but *please* no animations!