Sound Recordings

British Library Sounds website shortlisted in prestigious awards

The British Library Sounds website (http://sounds.bl.uk/) has been shortlisted in the Education category of this year’s prestigious Lovie Awards.

Named in honour of Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer, the Lovie Awards are the European equivalent of the Webby awards, and highlight the best of Europe's websites, mobiles and apps, online video and interactive advertising. This year, work from over 20 different European countries was shortlisted.

Shortlisted entries into the Lovie Awards are those entries that the judges deemed noteworthy and of a high quality yet were not scored quite high enough to qualify for Gold, Silver or Bronze awards.

See http://lovieawards.eu/winners/ - you need to scroll a long way down the page or to use the filters in the right hand column or your browser's text search feature.

New collection of sport interviews

Elspeth Millar, Oral History Archive Assistant, writes:

As part of the British Library’s Olympic celebrations we have made available a new online package of sixty-one oral history interviews documenting the lives and careers of British sportsmen and women throughout the twentieth century.  Recorded over the past twenty years, the recordings within the Sport package are drawn from a number of oral history collections archived at the British Library, and include interviews with track, field and road athletes, fencers, canoeists and swimmers. 

Many of those whose interviews are made available are household names (such as Sebastian Coe, Menzies Campbell, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Jacqui Agyepong, David Bedford, and Roger Black) whilst others are lesser-known or forgotten champions whom we hope will regain prominence through this new resource (such as marathon runner Jim Peters, racewalker Don Thompson, and relay sprinter Bill Roberts).  The collection also includes unique interviews with those involved in the coaching and teaching of sport, and those who witnessed historic sporting events such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  There are also memories of the first Paralympics/Olympic Games for the Disabled in 1952 at Stoke Mandeville, an interview with Colin Hancock, dentist to the British Olympic team at the Barcelona Games, and with gold and silversmith Stuart Devlin, who designed the 2000 Sydney Olympics gold coin series. 

The recordings are available worldwide and can be accessed at http://sounds.bl.uk/oral-history/sport; we hope to add further interviews to the collection in the future.

New interviews with scientists available

Elspeth Millar, Oral History Archive Assistant, writes:

Further interviews with scientists, engineers and technicians have been made accessible worldwide via the British Library Sounds website.  The latest interviews available are:

• Bob Parkinson (Aeronautical Engineering)
• David (Dai) Edwards (Computer Software)
• A.T. (Dick) Grove (Geography)
• Dame Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley (Computer Software)
• Sir Anthony Laughton (Oceanography)
• Norman Smith (Oceanography)
• Michael Forrest (Physics)
• Roger Moreton (Structural Materials)
• David Cartwright (Oceanography)
• Stan Evans (Physics, Geophysics)
• Ann Wintle (Physics)
• John Lindgren (Geography)

All of the interviews are accompanied by a fully searchable content summary and most also have a verbatim transcript available as pdf.  The interviews were conducted for the Oral History of British Science project; further information on the project can be found via the project webpage, wikipedia and the History of Science blog.

Interactivity and British Library Sounds

Have you recently visited the new British Library Sounds website and tried out its new features?

The British Library Sounds website (http://sounds.bl.uk) now has 50,000 sound tracks, all freely available for listening online. It represents the most diverse online collection of scholarly sounds anywhere, and now has improved interactive features, including tagging, favouriting, playlist generation and timed annotation features.

Simply register on http://sounds.bl.uk, then those features are enabled. Registering allows you to make notes, add tags and personally manage items using favourites and playlists.

An example of timed annotations is here:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Survey-of-English-dialects... (& see the screen grab image below), but please do register yourself and add your own notes to other tracks.

Watch this space over the next few weeks as we announce more collections that have recently been digitised and copyright-cleared for public access.

Recording of the Week: Professor Sir Alan Cottrell (1919-2012)

Tom Lean, National Life Stories interviewer, writes:

The National Life Stories team were saddened to learn of the death last week of Sir Alan Cottrell, who was interviewed for the Oral History of British Science project in March 2011 (Sound and Moving Image Catalogue reference C1379/46).  Sir Alan was born in Birmingham in 1919 and studied at the University of Birmingham for both his BSc and PhD . A centrally important figure in the modern history of metallurgy, he spent the second Second World War improving the hardening of tank armour, before moving postwar to atomic research establishment at Harwell, where he worked ensuring the safety of the Magnox nuclear reactors. As Goldsmiths Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge he became a champion of new approaches to metallurgy and understanding how materials behave on an atomic level. In 1965 he left academic life to serve in a succession of senior posts in the scientific civil service, and succeeded Sir Solly Zuckerman as Chief Scientific Adviser in 1971. The interview with Sir Alan can be accessed online via British Library Sounds.

The new British Library Sounds website

Launched today, the new British Library Sounds website at http://sounds.bl.uk lets you listen for free to 50,000 tracks of music, spoken words and environmental sounds. Listeners at licensed UK universities and colleges may additionally download tracks for their research.

Here are 10 'taster' clips:

Originally launched as a service for UK universities and colleges in 2007 as 'Archival Sound Recordings', with support of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) under its Digitisation Programme, the new British Library Sounds site introduces a number of enhancements available to anybody:

• completely redesigned pages
• improved navigation
• new audio player with waveforms
• improvements for linking to pages
• improved sound maps
• and if you sign up for free registration, you can:
• add notes at specific points on the audio timelines
• create your own playlists
• add tags and 'favourite' specific tracks so that you can easily find them again on return visits to the site.

More information.

Feedback on the new site is welcome and will help us add further improvements to the site.

Michael Katakis and Kris Hardin recordings

Elspeth Millar, Oral History Archive Assistant, writes:

A new exhibition at the British Library is celebrating the work of American photographer Michael Katakis.  The exhibition coincides with the launch of a new publication Michael Katakis: Photographs and Words, a collaboration of photographs by Katakis and observations from his wife, the anthropologist Dr Kris L. Hardin. 

Michael Katakis and Kris Hardin donated their archives (including Michael's photographs and negatives,
and Kris's fieldwork notes and recordings) to the British Library in 2008.  At the time of the deposit, the Oral History section at the British Library (with funding from the Eccles Centre for American Studies) recorded a joint interview with both Katakis and Hardin at the Library, followed by two separate life story interviews recorded in early 2009 in the United States. 

The 'Michael Katakis Photographs' exhibition features photographs from the projects 'The Vietnam Veterans Memorial', 'Troubled Land: 12 Days Across America' (a portrait of the US in the days after 9/11) and 'A Time and Place Before War' (a project documenting life in Sierra Leone before the outbreak of civil war in 1991).  Reflections on all three projects, and in particular the time spent in Sierra Leone by Katakis and Hardin, can be found in all three interviews (catalogued on the Sound Archive catalogue as 'Michael Katakis and Kris Hardin interviews', collection reference C1348).  The interviews are accessible on-site at the British Library via the SoundServer service. 

Kris Hardin and her namesake Bondu Kris (Kainkordu 1988) [credit: Michael Katakis]

Post-war theatre interviews online now

Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings, writes:

Audio interviews conducted for the Theatre Archive Project are now available to listen to online. Full transcripts are also included.

The Theatre Archive Project is a collaboration between the British Library and De Montfort University, although the partner for much of the project was the University of Sheffield. The project reinvestigates British theatre history 1945-1968, from the perspectives of both theatregoers and practitioners. 

Since the project began in November 2003, recordists - mainly University of Sheffield students - have conducted more than 250 interviews with those visiting or working in the theatre during the period. Almost all of those audio recordings and transcripts are available on this site. More are still being added.

Actors interviewed include Linda Bellingham, Bernard Hepton, Glenda Jackson, Murray Melvin, Joan Plowright, Corin Redgrave and Dudley Sutton.

Writers include Trevor Griffiths, Peter Nichols, Ann Jellicoe, Ann Piper and Arnold Wesker.

In addition there are interviews with theatre managers, producers, directors and designers, plus - giving a valuable non-professional perspective - many interviews with ordinary theatregoers.

The interviews with theatre professionals reveal their first encounters with the theatre, aspects of their work practices and the process of becoming a professional in what were often difficult circumstances. The interviews with theatregoers provide a contextualization of the productions and their reception by the communities at the time and in retrospect.

The Writing Life: Authors Speak podcasts

Sarah O'Reilly, project interviewer for Authors' Lives writes:

Extracts from the oral history collection Authors’ Lives have recently been published on a 2-disc CD, ‘The Writing Life: Authors Speak’. One of the most difficult tasks in putting the CD together was to boil down the hundreds of hours of interviews we had in the archive into two 70-minute CDs. And seeing as those interviews covered all aspects of the writer’s life – from what may make someone grow up to be a writer, to their experience of the writing process and the things that inspire them, to the changes they may have witnessed over the last half century to the way in which books are written, published and read – we had a job deciding which aspect of the writer’s life the CD should focus on.

In the end we felt that a CD which could shed some light on the creative process would be of most interest to listeners, and the most straightforward way of handling the heterogenous material within the collection. Because though we may know as readers what it is to live with (or should that be through?) a book, we probably don’t know much about the writer’s experience of the creative process, let alone their values, inspirations and perceptions of their craft. And how much do we understand about the way in which a writer’s life may be put into the service of their work? We hope ‘The Writing Life: Authors’ Speak’ will shed some light on these mysterious areas.

A BL podcast on ‘The Writing Life: Authors Speak’ can be found here.  To hear three interviewees – Philip Hensher, Hilary Spurling and Michael Frayn - discussing their writing lives in a recent event in the Library Conference Centre, click here.  The interviews within the Authors' Lives archive can be browsed on the Sound Archive catalogue by searching with the collection reference number C1276.

Recording of the week: Professor David Jenkinson FRS

The Oral History of British Science team were saddened to hear the announcement last week that one of our interviewees, Professor David Jenkinson FRS, had passed away on 16^th February.

Professor Jenkinson was a soil scientist and a long-serving member of Rothamsted staff, starting as a Scientific Officer in the then Pedology Department in 1957 and retiring from the Soil Science Department in 1988.  He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991.

In part 2 of his life-story interview Professor Jenkinson discusses his secondary education at the Royal School Armagh, building radios with his brother, and memories of home-made gunpowder:

http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=021M-C1379X0006XX-0002V0.xml

'Recording of the Week' highlights gems from the Archival Sound Recordings website, chosen by British Library experts or recommended by listeners.