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Learning From (And Laughing At) The Country’s Televised Past
Fans of obscure pop culture and history buffs will welcome the complete redesign and relaunch of the CBC Digital Archives. The website features an amazing collection of 12,000 television and radio clips drawn from seventy years of CBC broadcasts. The CBC’s serious side is well-represented on the site, with historic clips of the Second World War, political profiles, and stories of cultural milestones. But there are also plenty of quaintly anachronistic news reports, such as the public broadcaster’s take on Toronto beatniks in the 1950s and Yorkville hippies in the 1960s. Until now, access to these nuggets was hobbled by an outdated and cumbersome Digital Archives website, which hadn’t been revamped since its original launch in 2002.
The new design is more intuitive, making the archive easier to explore by browsing categories or jumping from clip to related clip. The absence of an advanced search option, however, can mean mining through pages and pages of results for something specific. Added interactivity lets users rate or comment on clips, but still missing is YouTube’s ability to embed the clips on another site, which would allow people to share them more widely.
The site’s focus remains largely educational, with lots of activities for teachers, abundant background notes on each clip, and a button for generating bibliographic citations. Yet, amongst all the news reports and current affairs stories, there are countless entertaining treasures. These can be interesting, like the reports of Keith Richards’s Toronto heroin bust in 1978. They can be amusing, like Peter Gzowski playing straight man to a manic Robin Williams. Or they can be downright bizarre, such as Bob Miller of the Blue Jays explaining the finer points of chewing tobacco and spitting at umpires without getting caught. Whether you need to research a paper or just want to poke around through weird bits of Canada’s past, this is a huge improvement to an already useful site.