Sound archivists estimate that we have only 15 years in which to digitise historic recordings - many of them invaluable to researchers in fields ranging from social history to musicology - before formats such as wax cylinders and acetate discs start to decay and the equipment required to play them is no longer available.
Over the five-year period from 2017 to 2022, therefore, the library will now digitise and make accessible 500,000 rare, unique and at-risk recordings and other key British collections.
The material includes:
- writers from Lord Alfred Tennyson to Sylvia Plath reading from their own work;
- underwater recordings of killer whales, calls of long-extinct birds and a recording which helped to save the bittern from extinction in the UK;
- interviews with people from all walks of life, from Kindertransport refugees to second-wave feminists;
- previously unheard performances such as Sir Laurence Olivier playing Coriolanus in 1959;
- a complete archive of 50 years of services, choral and opera performances in Canterbury Cathedral;
- and the huge corpus of accents and slang, right across class and region, used for the 1950s Survey of English Dialects.
Along with preserving and digitising all this, the ?9.5 million will enable the library and its partners to develop a national preservation network through ten regional centres of archival excellence.
It will also run a major outreach programme to celebrate the UK’s sound heritage, and raise awareness of the sheer range of living history held in archives across the country.
