The British Library Sound Archive in London, England is one of the largest collections of recorded sound in the world, including music, spoken word and ambient recordings. Founded by Patrick Saul, it opened in 1955 as the British Institute of Recorded Sound. It became part of the British Library in 1983.
It holds more than three million recordings, including over a million discs and 200,000 tapes. These include commercial record releases, chiefly from the UK, but with some from overseas, radio broadcasts (many from the BBC Sound Archive) and privately-made recordings.
The specialist collections are:
- Classical music
- Drama and literature
- Oral history
- Popular music
- Wildlife sound
- World and traditional music
Printed Materials
The Sound Archive holds an extensive reference collection of printed materials relating to recordings. The collection includes books and periodicals from around the world, a wide-ranging collection of discographies, and one of the largest collections of commercial record catalogues dating back to the early 1900s.
Services
The Sound Archive provides a range of services. The Sound Archive's online catalogue of over 3 million recordings can be viewed at http://cadensa.bl.uk, and it is updated daily. Recordings may be listened to free of charge in the British Library Reading Rooms. Copies of recordings can be purchased subject to copyright clearance and spectrograms of wildlife sounds can be made to order. The Archival Sound Recordings service provides free online access for UK higher and further education institutions to over 32,000 rare recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments. Some of these recordings are also accessible for general public listening online.
Educational Services
The British Library offers training workshops and events in oral history and wildlife sound recording, as well as audiovisual archiving internships.
Publications
Playback, the bulletin of the British Library Sound Archive, is published free of charge twice a year. A range of British Library CDs are available covering nature sounds, world music, historical speeches and recordings of famous poets, playwrights and authors .
See also
- Theatre Archive Project Oral History strand.
- Archival Sound Recordings service for UK higher and further education, funded by the JISC.
- Peter Copeland Conservation Manager of the National Sound Archive/British Library Sound Archive from 1986-2002.
External links
- British Library Sound Archive web pages
- The British Library Sound Archive catalogue (CADENSA)
- Archival Sound Recordings
Coordinates: 51°31′47″N 0°07′39″W / 51.5298°N 0.1275°W
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This page was last modified on 16 February 2010 at 22:21.
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