The gathering of famous literary characters pictured above - I think that's Hercule Poirot at the back there - took place at the British Library on 5 November. It was organized by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to highlight the 80th anniversary of the Talking Books service for people who are blind or partially sighted.  

The RNIB's Talking Books service provides 4,000 audio books every single day to people with sight loss.

In celebration of its 80th anniversary, the service will be provided entirely free for all blind and partially sighted people, starting today.  

The first talking books were issued on 24-rpm discs with Braille labels, under the series title 'Talking Books for the Blind'. 

The British Library holds a collection of around 200 or so of these. They were donated by the RNIB in 2009, long after the format had been discontinued.

The content ranges from Bible stories to classics like The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot and thrillers such as The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain.

However many of the sets are incomplete and many titles are not represented at all, including the very first: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

The Library is keen to expand the collection should the opportunity arise. If you have any of these discs please do get in touch.

And if you would like to know more about the history of talking books I can recommend this 2013 blog post by Matt Rubery: The First Audiobook.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Burton upon Trent, Belper, Two Dales, Heanor and Swadlincote. Together they constitute the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Radio Derby. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Two Dales, Heanor and Swadlincote also include a detailed description of the phonology and grammar of the speakers.

These linguistic descriptions, created by researchers in the Library’s Voices of the UK project, identify and celebrate the fascinating combination of local, vernacular and archaic vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar that make up our regional accents and dialects. The following passage, recorded in Swadlincote, illustrates a number of intriguing features of broad dialect:

and that’s why I cudna spell at school they said teacher used say to me sound it and write it how you sound it well (so we did) if I was if I was calling my next door a gel and I’d got write girl I cudna write ’cause hoo were a gel to me so I wrote G E L gel (gel gel) so I cudna spell never could spell and I canna now cause I were always taught the wrong teacher used tell me off for not not sounding it and when I sounded it I sounded it as I said it (yeah) and I were wrong (that’s right) so whichever road I did it I were wrong

There are a number of grammatical constructions here that are typical of speech in the area. Firstly, the speaker forms negative statements by adding the suffix <na> to the verb rather than the more common variant <n’t> that occurs in most parts of England. In an area centred on the Peak District and the Potteries some speakers say, for instance, dunna for ‘don’t/doesn’t’; inna for ‘isn’t’; anna for ‘hasn’t/haven’t’ ; and adna for hadn’t and – as here – canna and cudna for ‘can’t’ and ‘couldn’t’ respectively. Derbyshire dialect also exhibits the so-called bare infinitive – that is the word ‘to’ is omitted with verbs such as ‘want to’, ‘have to’ and – as here – got write [= ‘got to write’] and used say [= ‘used to say’]. This construction occurs more widely in dialects across the East Midlands and North West England and crops up regularly, for instance, in the dialogue of the BBC sitcom Peter Kay’s Car Share. In the final episode (22 May 2015) John, played by Bolton’s Peter Kay, presents Kayleigh with a novelty lamp to mark their last car-share trip together, explaining how he’d struggled to find one but ‘I managed _ track one down in Preston’.

Perhaps the most intriguing item here, though, is this speaker’s use of the feminine pronoun hoo [= ‘she’] (like many speakers in England he drops the initial <h> sound so it sounds like he says ‘oo were a gel’). Research carried out for the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s uncovered a handful of examples of ‘hoo’ in a similar area of the North West Midlands. An extraordinary example of the survival of the Old English pronoun ‘heo’, it was considered extremely rare even then and most observers expected it to disappear within a generation. Yet here we are at the start of the 21^st century and a Derbyshire dialect speaker is using a historic form perfectly naturally and spontaneously.

Maybe Mrs. Gardiner was right when reassuring Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that ‘Derbyshire is the best of all counties.’

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Barrow-in-Furness, Brampton, Kirkoswald, Sedbergh and Workington. Together they constitute the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Radio Cumbria. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Barrow, Sedbergh and Workington also include a detailed description of the phonology and grammar of the speakers.

Most of us are immediately struck by an unfamiliar dialect word - like the stereotypical use of lile [= 'little'] by speakers in Workington here or hadder [= 'to rain lightly'] in Kirkoswald. We also instantly recognise differences in pronunciation and as these recordings show Cumbria has a particularly diverse range of accents - listen, for instance, to the recordings in Barrow-in-Furness and Workington. Grammatical differences between dialects, however, are often overlooked or - in many cases - dismissed as somehow 'wrong'. Consider, though, the following negative constructions:

0:41:25 they're not getting taught at home properly (Sedbergh)

0:07:20 we're not gonna talk right neither (Workington)

1:03:02 it's not really a life-changing thing (Barrow)

In the examples above the negative particle, not, remains intact while the verb in each case is reduced. This type of construction - known as 'auxiliary contraction' - tends to occur more frequently in northern dialects and in Scotland; elsewhere these statements would be more likely to surface as they aren't, we aren't and it isn't - i.e. the verb remains intact and not is contracted. In northern English you'll hear forms like you'll not [= 'you won't'], I've not [= 'I haven't'] and she'd not [= 'she hadn't'] and the process can also extend to negative questions such as did you not [= 'didn't you'] and have they not [= 'haven't they'] as in the example below:

0:06:25 can you not sort of speak a bit more proper (Workington)

Some speakers in Cumbria and much of northern England also use a distinctive form of the verb have:

0:26:00 we had a lot of connections with people in Liverpool because I've relatives there (Sedbergh)

1:00:50 I never got married and I've no children (Workington)

Many speakers elsewhere in the UK would insert got here, as in I've got relatives and I've got no children (or even more likely I haven't got any children). Not only do some northerners use have as a finite verb in such cases, they also frequently produce a contracted form (e.g. in the second example I've relatives there is more marked than I've got relatives there or I have relatives there). This tendency to reduce have also produces idiosyncratic forms in northern English when have to is used in the sense of 'must'. A speaker in Sedbergh comments: he'd to walk it in them days (Sedbergh, 1:03:47) which would more commonly be expressed as he had to walk it in the south of England.

Clearly neither the use of a contracted form of have as a full verb nor the preference for auxiliary contraction can in any way be interpreted as 'wrong' so let's start celebrating our dialect grammar as we do our regional vocabulary and accents.

On 29 June 2015 the British Library is hosting English Grammar Day in which leading language authorities will reflect on the state of, and attitudes towards, English grammar and vocabulary. Our new programme for 2015 includes talks by university linguists, Jenny Cheshire and Charlotte Brewer; journalist and author, Harry Ritchie; teachers, Dan Clayton and Amanda Redfearn and dialect curator, Jonnie Robinson and an opportunity to put your questions about English grammar to our panel of experts. A perfect opportunity for us to enjoy those wonderful North West infinitive variants - the 'for to infinitive':

0:46:24 they just let us use whichever hand come natural for to write with (Workington)

and the 'bare infinitive', as demonstrated repeatedly in the excellent sit-com, Car Share, such as in the poignant scene at the end of this week's final episode when John (played by Peter Kay) gave Kayleigh a novelty heart lamp she thought had sold out, proudly telling her 'I managed _ track one down in Preston'.

We are delighted to announce that the British Library has been earmarked funding of over £9.5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to help save the nation’s sound recordings and open them up online for everyone to hear.

For those of you familiar with our Save our Sounds project, this is very welcome news. According to the predictions of sound archivists the world over, we have fifteen years in which to digitise historic sound recordings before the equipment required to play some formats can no longer be used, and some formats such as wax cylinders and acetate discs start to naturally decay.

Examination of a damaged lacquer disc in our sound labs

This problem doesn’t just apply to the national sound archive of over 6.5m recordings held at the British Library; it applies to collections around the country.

As part of our ongoing UK Sound Directory project, we have identified over 1m sound collections on dozens of different formats across the UK which also risk disappearing, which range from recordings of killer whales made off the coast of Shetland (held by the Centre for Wildlife Conservation, University of Cumbria), to a collection of sounds held in the Canterbury Cathedral archives spanning 50 years of services, choral and opera performances and other recordings, many of which are thought to be unique.

Thanks to the £9.5m funding from the HLF, we will be able to digitise and publish online up to 500,000 rare and unique sounds from the Library’s own collections and those around the UK which are most at risk, including local dialects and accents, oral histories, previously unheard musical performances and plays, and vanishing wildlife sounds.

Some of the many rare recordings in the British Library's sound archive

From 2017-2022, we will work with partner institutions across the UK to develop a national preservation network via ten regional centres. Together we will digitise, preserve and share our unique audio heritage. We will also run a major outreach programme to schools and local communities to celebrate and raise awareness of UK sounds.

Our challenge, as outlined in our Living Knowledge vision published earlier this year, is to preserve as many as possible of the nation’s rare and unique sound recordings, and also to protect the future of our audio heritage, by improving the way in which we collect sounds digitally.

We are extremely grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for answering that urgent need, and enabling us to take this first major step in our plans.

Find out more about our HLF funding on our Press site and join in the conversation on Twitter using #SaveOurSounds

On January the 12th the British Library launched the Save our Sounds programme.

Since then we have been building a Directory of UK Sound Collections by gathering information from sound collection holders across the country about the condition, formats, extent, uniqueness and subject matter of their collections.

This valuable information will allow us to assess the state of the nation's recorded heritage and the risks it faces.

Project deadline extension

Since the last Directory update the response has been fantastic and, to date, we have received information on 925 individual collections totalling 838,473 individual items.

Due to the excellent response we are happy to announce that the deadline for submission of collection details has been extended to May 31st.

Taking part

If you have a sound collection, no matter how big or small, we would love to include it in our survey so please get in touch.

All informaton about how to submit collection information can be found on the Directory project page or you can email us on [email protected].

Promotion is vital to the success of the project so please help us to spread the word to any friends, relatives or colleagues you feel may be in possesion of a sound archive or collection.

You can follow the British Library Sound Archive on Twitter via @soundarchive and the project hashtag is #SaveOurSounds.

We know that there are many more collections out there and we would love to hear about them!

What we have discovered so far

The responses already received have provided great insight into the types of collection holders in the UK, the breadth of the subjects that their collections cover, the formats they are held on and what condition the collections are in. With this information, we can begin to assess the state of the nation’s sound collections and the risks they face.

Items reported, by format.

The above graph demonstrates the diversity of formats we have received information on ranging from wax phonograph cylinders and shellac discs to MiniDiscs and DATs. We will publish advice on the risks to and care of these different formats in a later blog post.

Collection highlights

We have received information on a huge range of subjects demonstrating the great wealth and diversity of the UK's sound collections including the following collections of interest:

Classical and Experimental Music

• Daphne Oram Archive: over 500 recordings of works by the pioneering British composer and electronic musician Daphne Oram (1925 - 2003), creator of the "Oramics" system, a technique used to create electronic sounds.
• Delia Derbyshire Archive: featuring over 267 tapes covering Derbyshire's time as a composer at the BBC's groundbreaking Radiophonic Workshop between 1962 and 1973.
• Centre for Russian Music Archive: an archive of over 500 recordings including notable material donated by the Glinka State Museum for Musical Culture in Moscow.

World and Traditional Music

• Kenneth A. Gourlay Archive: material relating to Gourlay's ethnomusicological research on the musical cultures of Uganda, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea.
• Bristol Record Office St Paul's Archive: recordings of performances spanning the history of the St. Paul’s carnival.
• Essex Record Office Traditional Music Archive: Over 1000 recordings of traditional and folk music played by Essex musicians or performed at Essex venues.

Drama and Literature

• Lily Greenham Collection: original tapes belonging to poet and experimental sound artist Lily Greenham (1924-2001).
• Bunnet-Muir Musical Theatre Trust Archive: over 11,000 audio recordings on cylinder, 78, 45 and 33 rpm records, cassettes, reel to reel, CD & piano rolls.
• The Rambert Archive: over 800 recordings created by the Rambert Dance Company through the process of the work the company produce.

Collection Subjects

Language and Dialect

• University of Cambridge Library Collections: including the Linguistic Survey of India collection.

Popular Music and Jazz

• Women's Revolutions Per Minute (WRPM) Archive: WRPM was set up in 1977 as part of the Women's Art Collective in London promoting festivals of music by women as part of the Women's Liberation Movement. 
• Dave Collett Blues Collection: recordings of the pianist for Acker Bilk band.

Radio

• BBC Essex Archive: Over 7,000 BBC Essex radio recordings including interviews, documentaries, outside broadcasts, news, sport, vox pops and phone-ins.
• George William Target Collection: Sound recordings of George William Target (1924-2005), writer and religious commentator. Includes a recording of Desert Island Discs and Target's contribution to the Today programme's feature 'Thought for Today'.

Heatmap showing collection  locations.

Speeches and events

• Cumbria Local History Archive: speeches made during the 1951 General Election campaign by Walter Monslow, Clement Atlee; Speeches made at CND meetings and rallies in Barrow-in-Furness 1984-1985 including Bruce Kent, Captain James Bush (USA), Joan Ruddock, Michael Foot MP, Japanese speakers from Hiroshima.

News

• Ronald Sturt & Talking Newspapers for the Blind: recordings relating to Ronald Sturt's life and involvement with Talking Newspapers for the Blind, 1970-2002.

Oral History

• Manchester Jewish Museum Archive: 716 recordings from the early 1970s onwards containing interviews with first, second and third generation Jewish immigrants and providing unique anecdotal evidence of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Ambleside Oral History Archive: An ongoing oral history project which began in 1978 and has recorded the lives and times of over 450 people born in the Lake District from 1877 onwards.

Natural Sounds

• British Trust for Ornithology Archive: over 780 recordings of ornithological interest including a copy of a set of BBC recordings made in the early 1960s.
• RIDGEWAYsounds: field recordings and mixed soundscapes made by participants of Seasonal Sound Walks and Sounds of the Neolithic on the South Dorset Ridgeway.

The British Library's Directory of UK Sound Collections is one of the first steps in our Save our Sounds programme; one of the key strands of Living Knowledge, the British Library's new vision and purpose for its future.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English writes:

'Me mam '– it means ‘your mum’ or summat like that. These are the words of a twelve-year-old girl from Hull recorded at the British Library’s ‘Evolving English’ exhibition in 2010. ‘Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices’ was a major exhibition that explored the evolution of the English Language over 1,500 years through the Library’s extensive collection of manuscripts, printed books, newspapers, sound recordings, digital media and ephemera. The exhibition celebrated historic and contemporary diversity by presenting examples of English usage across time and space. Specially designed telephone booths were installed in the Library’s Paccar gallery in St Pancras and at six partner libraries across England, in which visitors were encouraged to contribute a voice recording to create a snapshot of spoken English at the start of the 21^st century. They could either submit a word or phrase they felt was somehow ‘special’ in their variety of English (the ‘WordBank’) or recite a reading passage designed to capture their accent (the ‘VoiceBank’).

The public and media response to the exhibition confirmed enormous enthusiasm for debate about many aspects of the English Language, but above all demonstrated our fascination with, and affection for, features of English with which we connect on a personal level – the dialects, accents, slang and nonce-words that express our sense of individual and shared identities. The exhibition attracted over 147,000 visitors, approximately 15,000 of whom submitted recordings that resulted in a substantial audio archive. As with previous surveys of vernacular speech, the Evolving English WordBank is testament to this multidimensional diversity and, moreover, proof of enormous popular interest in the English language. This Sunday speakers all over the world - like our speaker from Hull, for exzmple - will be sending messages to their aged P, bibi, M, ma, mam, mamma, mammy, marge, marmie, mater, mom, mommy, mother, mum, muma, mummy, mummy-ji, muv or old dear and their preference for one form or another will reveal subtle clues about social status, gender, ethnicity, geographic background and/or age.

Contributions to the WordBank were made by speakers aged between six and ninety from a variety of social and geographic backgrounds all over the world, making it a uniquely inclusive and wide-ranging archive of spoken words and phrases. The Library has uploaded an initial set of contributions to the Sounds website and a selection of British English submissions are published this week in ‘Evolving English WordBank: a Glossary of Present-Day English Dialect and Slang’ (Bradwells Books, 2015). Selecting entries for inclusion has been both enjoyable and enlightening and I have regularly smirked, winced and raised a quizzical eye in reacquainting myself with familiar favourites, encountering amusing banter, discovering terms I was previously unaware of and marvelling at originality and inventiveness. The WordBank is a rich resource for academic linguists that offers a variety of research enquiries, from dialectology to lexicography, but is above all a treasure trove for enthusiasts of the English language.

Although not a comprehensive record of the entire WordBank data set, the selections online and in the book provide a snapshot of vernacular English at the start of the 21^st century, chosen to give a sense of variation according to a range of geographical and social factors. The book focuses exclusively on British English so it is gratifying to report, for instance, that historic local forms such as jiffle [= ‘to fidget, wriggle about’] and puggle [= ‘to prod, poke about in e.g. hole to clear obstruction’] – both contributed by young speakers from the south of England, where the apparent demise of local dialect is most frequently asserted – prove our regional dialects remain robust. Conversely, forms like bubbe [= ‘grandmother’] and thanda [= ‘cold’] reveal the influence of successive waves of migration to the UK by speakers of heritage languages from all four corners of the world, thereby enriching our language and ensuring its continued diversity. Inspired neologisms like ding [= ‘to microwave’] and squirgle [= ‘sausage’] bear witness to our linguistic playfulness and sheer love of the sounds of words, while fashionable terms such as mint [= ‘great, excellent’] and buff ting [= ‘attractive person’] reflect our desire to identify linguistically with our peers. Above all the detailed observations provided by so many speakers clearly demonstrate the importance we attach to certain words and the affection we feel for phrases and expressions that convey a sense of self, location, friendship or family bonds. A bit like Mother’s Day, really.

The WordBank is one of a number of unique audio collections held at the British Library. Through the Library's Save Our Sounds programme, you can help us preserve the nation's sound heritage.

Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English writes:

This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Warleggan, Penzance, Mawla, St Feock and Truro. Together they constitute the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Radio Cornwall. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Mawla, St Feock and Truro, also include a detailed description of the phonology and grammar of the speakers.

St Feock Methodist Church

A distinctive feature of established accents in Cornwall is rhoticity - that is speakers pronounce the <r> sound after a vowel in words like better, hard and first. This was at one time a feature of speech throughout the UK and indeed, until relatively recently was still widely heard across much of southern England. Nowadays it is most commonly associated with speech in the West Country and South West, a small area of Lancashire and most of Scotland and Northern Ireland. All five recordings here include speakers who are rhotic to varying degrees, although it is immediately apparent that the speakers in Warleggan, Penzance, Mawla and St Feock are much more consistent in their use of 'postvocalic R' than their younger counterparts in Truro, whose speech is predominantly non-rhotic except for a few isolated examples.

You can also hear several examples of the distinctive Cornish dialect pronoun system:

Mawla - [0:31:00] adder'll bite you even if he's in a good mood, won't her, if you step on he he'll bite you

St Feock - [0:16:47] if they're lying prostrate, need a operation, don't them

Penzance - give en a clout; Warleggan - give en a good hiding [= 'to hit hard']

The form of the pronoun contrasts here with Standard English conventions for subject and object position - a phenomenon known as pronoun exchange - and some speakers also use an archaic form en, a reflex of the Old English masculine object pronoun hine. Individual speakers vary in terms of the frequency with which they use these dialectal grammatical features, and they are absent from the younger contributors from Truro.

Mawla Methodist Church

It would be wrong, though, to conclude that the younger speakers in Truro sound in any way less Cornish. They use a number of local vowel sounds and occasional 'broader' dialectal pronunciations, such as idn [= isn't] and, like the speakers in the other recordings, offer several local dialect words like teasy [= 'moody'], and enting down [= 'raining heavily']. One young Truro hairdresser even supplies the historic Cornish term old Tuss (a local form of address) and admits she often says she's chacking for a piss [= 'dying to go to the toilet']. No lesser authority than the English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) records the verb chack, including a citation from Cornwall in 1808: I'm chacking with hunger.

This evidence of older and present-day Cornish dialect continuity and change is one of a number of unique audio collections held at the British Library. Through the Library's Save Our Sounds programme, you can help us preserve the nation's sound heritage.

Digital technologies have transformed the ways in which we create and store recorded sound.  Until recently, sound recording and reproduction has relied on media like tapes, discs and cassettes, and the technologies to access those media in appropriate ways.  Today, these media have been replaced with digital storage systems, allowing us to create recordings in greater numbers, to store them more efficiently, and to provide access to them more effectively.

But this transition from physical to digital highlights one of the key issues facing custodians of recorded sound collections: as older media disappear and industry support for replaying them evaporates, how can we ensure that sounds remain accessible to future generations?

A degrading cellulose nitrate lacquer disc in the collections of the British Library

Professional consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save our sound collections by digitising them before they become unreadable and are effectively lost. These risks face all recorded sound collections, across the country; from home recordings to professional archives.

Just this month, internet pioneer Vint Cerf was widely reported as warning that digital information can too easily be lost because accessing it may require specialised software unavailable in the future.  This is something which presents a challenge to the digital preservation of many media. Fortunately, for audio, this problem is - to a degree - solved: digitising a sound recording to an internationally recognised, standard file format (in this case, WAV) aids longevity, because the file structure is well documented and simple to understand.

Save our Sounds

On 12^th January, the British Library launched a new initiative titled Save our Sounds: a vital programme recognising the risks facing the nation’s sound collections, and the urgent need to preserve our recorded heritage.

One of the major aims of this programme is to digitally preserve as much as possible of the UK’s rare and unique sound recordings; not just those in our collections but also key items from partner collections.

But digitisation takes time, and preservation planning on such a scale requires a clear understanding of the extent of collections; their subjects, uniqueness, and – importantly - what formats they are held on.

Surveying the UK’s Sound Collections

To help us understand the risks faced by the UK’s recorded heritage, the British Library is running a project to create a Directory of UK Sound Collections.  Through a nationwide survey which continues until 31^st March 2015, we have set out to reach and encourage as many collection owners as possible – from individuals with personal collections to large institutions – to send us information about the recordings they hold.

Graph showing number of items identified, per format

The responses received since the launch of our project have provided a fascinating insight into the types of collection holders in the UK, the breadth of the subjects that their collections cover, and the formats they are held on. With this information, we can build a clearer picture of the state of the nation’s recorded sound collections, the risks they face and the scale of the task ahead, if they are to be saved.

To date, we have received information on more than 320,000 items, from wax cylinders and lacquer discs to CD-Rs and MiniDiscs.

The recordings on these items cover a range of subjects, indicative of the diversity of the UK’s collections, including:

• Vast collections of oral histories, including interviews with nurses, veterans, evacuees, women potters, Jewish refugees, London dock workers, taxi drivers and policemen, travellers, immigrant communities, Yorkshire dalesfolk, and theatre workers.
• Home recordings made on wires and wax cylinders in the early part of the 20th century
• More than 15,000 UK shellac discs of British dance bands and early jazz recordings
• Recordings of English and Scottish folk musicians, from the mid-20^th century
• Sound art and experimental music from the 1960s to the present day
• Representative collections of classical music performances on shellac disc
• Speech and dialect recordings, calendar customs and traditions from across the UK
• BBC and Radio Luxembourg transmissions, including light music programmes from the 1950s and 60s, and personal collections from radio broadcasters and producers working in the UK
• Street noises and environmental sounds
• British bird song recorded in the field
• Interviews with and performances by composers, musicians, authors and politicians, including Winston Churchill, J.B. Priestley and J.R.R. Tolkien
• Recordings of speeches, conferences, ceremonies, lectures and events from throughout the 20^th century

Graph showing collection subjects, by type

Of course, there are many more collections out there, and we’d love to hear about them. We'll be publishing a summary report later in the year, and advice on caring for your collections.

So, if you have a sound collection – or even a single item – that you would like to add to our directory, please get in touch.  And promotion really is vital to the success of our project, so if you know someone who might be interested, do pass the message on.

You can follow the British Library Sound Archive on Twitter via @soundarchive and tag with #SaveOurSounds

The British Library’s Directory of UK Sound Collections is one of the first steps in our Save our Sounds programme; one of the key strands of Living Knowledge, the British Library’s new vision and purpose for its future.