Historic sound recordings go digital

size=18]Historic sound recordings go digital [/size]



15th April 2004. A major £1 million pound programme to digitise 12,000 items of sound recordings from the British Library's Sound Archive, which amounts to nearly 4,000 hours of recordings, has been announced today by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

This significant resource will be made freely available to further and higher education and will include a wide range of materials, including classical and popular music, broadcast radio, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

Examples currently held on the British Library site include a live recording of Paul Robeson in Othello, Florence Nightingale speaking (one of the earliest sound recordings), and Arthur Conan Doyle talking about the genesis of Sherlock Holmes. These historic recordings will be amongst an enormous wealth of materials available to the project to make available to further and higher education.

The Archival Sound Recordings is a £1m project, made possible through funding from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE). The overall digitisation programme, being managed by the JISC, represents a total investment of £10m to be applied to delivering high quality content online, including sound, moving pictures, census data and still images for long-term use by the further and higher education communities in the UK.

Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library welcomed the agreement, saying: "Sound recordings represent a massively untapped resource in the field of education. They are relevant to all subjects and we are delighted that this programme will bring wide access to rare, historic and hugely valuable sound resources. This partnership demonstrates the British Library's commitment to the sector and we are delighted to work with JISC to deliver it."

Stuart Dempster, JISC Programme Manager said: "This landmark project promises to deliver a wide range of targeted audio content from one of the world's leading sound archives to the UK education community, some of which will be selected by the education community through an online consultation. It recognises the potential transformative power of audio for use in learning, teaching and research."