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RSS feedsThe British Library in
partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has unveiled a
resource of nearly 4,000 hours of historic digital sound recordings available as
a teaching aid to those in Higher and Further education (FE).
The collection consists of 12,000 unique pieces, many rare, from unpublished
African music and radio material of political culture during the 1960’s and 70’s
to interviews with artists such as Elisabeth Frink the English sculptor and
printmaker,
David
Bailey celebrated photographer and Anthony Caro abstract sculptor
as well as an archive of performances of Beethoven string quartets reflecting
the change of performance style over the past 100 years.
The £1 million initiative has been funded through the JISC programme of digitising and publishing online of high quality material, part of a wider £10 million project particularly for the higher and FE sectors. Archival Sound Recordings (ASR) is password enabled to members of the higher and FE community.
Some of the original source material proved challenging for Memnon Auto Archiving Services who were tasked with digitising the often fragile analogue material. The African recordings were made on fragile magnetic tapes in the field, while the Beethoven String quartets were on 78rpm discs. Michel Merten, Director of Memnon explains “To handle a project of this scale, we developed innovative new techniques with the British Library, enabling us to preserve these cultural records for future generations.” Memnon also made the provision for the necessary technology to allow full search and retrieval from the metadata.
The British Library Chief Executive Lynne Brindley commenting on the ASR, hailed the new resource as an excellent opportunity for those in Higher and Further Education “Sound recordings represent a massively untapped resource in the field of education. The learning possibilities across almost all subject areas are immense.”
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