A Sound Idea

Archives come in all shapes and sizes and here at Ammba we love them all. One story which we’ve picked up on recently is the British Library’s intention to turn its fascinating sound collection into future digital content.

It’s been estimated that by 2030 much of the nation’s valuable audio archives could be lost forever. This is the opinion of the international archives community, who identify two key reasons for this worrying fact: ongoing physical degeneration of artefacts and the increasing obsolescence of playback hardware. Cue (pun totally intended) the British Library which has recently launched ‘Save our Sounds’ (@soundarchive), a project which aims to preserve their important collection through extensive digitisation.

They currently hold over 6.5 million recordings captured on numerous analogue and digital formats. Their collection is a wealth of wonderful content which includes spoken word, music, wildlife sounds and field recordings. As well as saving this precious archive, the British Library is also keen to preserve other sound collections and to create a directory of the country’s audio archives.

Running until the end of May 2015, the UK Sound Directory is an attempt to map rare and unique collections held by other museums, galleries, studios, broadcasters, in fact anybody with an interesting store of recorded sound. Once complete, the directory will make an important contribution to the preservation of the nation’s audio heritage. You can get involved in the survey at http://www.bl.uk/projects/uk-sound-directory

It’s great to hear that the BL are taking steps to save not only their own, but other sound archives. Audio recordings tell us so much about the rich and varied world we inhabit, from historic speeches and broadcasts to rumbling traffic noise and sweet birdsong. By digitising these collections they will not only save them for future generations, but have the opportunity to make them available to new audiences in interesting and innovative ways. And that can only be a good thing, because could you imagine a world without sound?

 

Matthew Jelfs. Matthew is our Digital Content Editor.

 

Photo by Alexey Ruban on Unsplash