A guest post by Rob Smith, post-graduate student in Library and Information Studies at UCL, who has recently been researching the Bishop Sound collection.

Recent activity in the British Library Sound Archive has involved digitising the Bishop Sound collection - a unique collection of lacquer disc records. The collection contains a broad range of material (some further examples are discussed in this earlier post) but the recorded performances of musical comedy hits from the 1930s and 1940s are of particular interest.

Lacquer disc technology was only introduced into the UK around 1934 and the earliest of these recordings made by the Bishop Sound and Electrical Company comes from 1937. Although no direct evidence exists, there appears to have been a strong working relationship between Jack Bishop of Bishop Sound and Firth Shephard - a popular impresario and theatre producer during that era. Bishop started working with Shephard on an early but hugely successful production called The Frog (1936) and their collaboration continued with productions of Going Greek (1937), Wild Oats (1938), and Running Riot (1938). Recordings for all but The Frog have been identified. 

Unfortunately none of these recorded performances are complete but they do contain excerpts that exemplify the style of popular performance from the time. This is an excerpt from Going Greek starring Leslie Henson - a comedy that follows the trials and tribulations of a group of bandits after they have taken an opera singer hostage. It gives you strong idea of the sort of humour found in these productions.

Listen to an excerpt from Going Greek

Bishop also formed associations with other celebrities of the day such as Ivor Novello. Discovered in the collection were recordings of Novello’s Arc de Triomphe (1943) and Perchance to Dream (1947). Incredibly both of these recordings have survived (mostly intact) and contain rare performances of songs such as 'Paris Reminds Me of You', 'Dark Music', and “We’ll Gather Lilacs'. 

One of the issues that arose out of the digitisation of the discs was identifying and sequencing the recordings. Little information came from the discs themselves so it was necessary to perform an investigation that drew on other significant resources found online and in the British Library. 

After identifying the plays from names or characters mentioned on the recordings, playscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection were consulted in order to sequence the transfers, based on the dialogue and songs. 

The Lord Chamberlain’s Office issued the legal license necessary to perform plays in the United Kingdom between 1824 and 1968. To receive a license, a copy of the playscript had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office. The Office was the official censor of all performed material. 

What was also discovered while sequencing the recordings to the playscript was how much the comedians and actors ad-libbed and nuanced their performances. This final excerpt, while brief, was un-scripted and presents a comedic reaction to the regulations that restricted what a performance could present.

Listen to another excerpt from Going Greek

These recent transfers are yet another example of the importance of audio preservation. It gives researchers and enthusiasts alike a deeper understanding of their chosen subject and gives us a unique glimpse into a past that could otherwise be forgotten.

If these issues interest you, please follow the Library's Save our Sounds campaign.

Over the last 2 1/2 years, we have been working alongside 25 European partners on a project that aims to enable and promote greater re-use of digitised cultural heritage resources. With its eyes focused firmly on the creative industries, Europeana Creative has facilitated the unlocking of previously restricted content and, through a series of pilots, produced apps and websites that demonstrate ways in which this material could potentially be used by the creative sector. Themed challenges were also issued to external developers, designers, artists and entrepreneurs to create viable online applications that in some way re-used cultural heritage content available through the Europeana platform. 

At the start of the project we were charged with providing access to 3000 wildlife, environmental and urban sound recordings under defined Creative Commons licenses. The first stage was to upload content to Europeana but, never ones to rest on our laurels, we also decided to provide access to as many sounds as possible through one of the most well-known audio platforms out there - SoundCloud.

The first recordings to begin the journey over to Soundcloud focus on the sounds of Britain's wildlife. Orginally presented on our website British Library Sounds, recordings featured in British Wildlife Recordings were, for most listeners, only available in a streaming capacity. Downloading was restricted to students at registered UK HE & FE institutions, thereby significantly limiting the potential for creative re-use beyond the academic sector. Now, under the auspices of Europeana Creative, these recordings are being migrated to Soundcloud and made available under CC-BY licenses. Here are just a few of the sounds that you can now download and re-use, edit however you wish:

More recordings will be added over the coming weeks so do keep an eye on the British Wildlife Recordings playlist - and if you happen to re-use some of these sounds in interesting and creative ways, do get in touch as we'd love to know!

In addition to releasing a range of sound recordings, more that 90,000 images have also been added to Europeana. Around 60,000 of these have been taken from a larger set of over 1 million public domain images released by the British Library onto Flickr Commons at the end of 2013. The rest have been drawn from the Library's Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, again under the public domain mark, but with some recommendations on access & re-use. Together, these digitised resources provide, what we hope will be, ample material for individuals working within the creative industries to re-use and draw inspiration from in a multitude of different ways.

Image taken from page 200 of 'British Ornithology; being the history, with a coloured representation of every known species of British birds'

Image taken from page 26 of 'Bonnie Bairns. Illustrated by H. Jackson. Edited by Edric Vredenburg. Verses by E. M. Chettle, etc'

Image taken from page 215 of 'Siberia in Asia: a visit to the valley of the Yenesay in East Siberia. With description of the natural history, migration of birds, etc. ... With map, etc'

Kings9 f. 66v: Annunciation (Miniature of the Annunciation to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel. Mary sits with a book; the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove. In the margin is a note from Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII, reading 'Be daly prove you shall me fynde / To be to you bothe lovynge and kynde.') 

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.

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.

A guest post by John Park, Editor of Fringe Report.

The first volume of Fringe Report, covering the years 2002-2003, is now available exclusively for consultation by readers at the British Library.

Fringe Report was a website based in London which reviewed fringe theatre, arts, independent and arthouse film, dance, performance, poetry, music - anything that fell off the edge of the mainstream - though it often covered that too. There were no rigid lines.

It published two or three items a week all year round, was an accredited reviewer to Internet Movie Database and did in-depth interviews, features, gossip, and reports on parties. 

Over the coming years, the whole content of Fringe Report 2002-2012 is being put into book form and donated to the British Library as a historical archive, a snapshot of the off-mainstream arts at the start of the twenty-first century.

The next volume, currently in preparation, will cover all the Fringe Report Awards - there are 250 of them - from 2003 to 2012, with the award certificates reproduced in colour.  It is due for presentation in spring 2015. 

The cast and company of Yard Gal (Oval House Theatre, London, 2008), including actors Stefanie Di Rubbo and Monsay Whitney, and director Stef O'Driscoll, accept the Fringe Report Award 2009 for Best Production. Fringe Report Awards 9 February 2009, Leicester Square Theatre. Photo © Stefan Lubomirski De Vaux, 2009.

Fringe Report started in July 2002 and ran until 2012. It covered 50 shows each year and reviewed at the London Film Festival, the Dublin and Brighton Fringe Festivals, with reports over the years from other locations including Camden, Bath, Newbury, Reading and Montreal.

It had permanent writers in London, New York, Dublin, Denver, Edinburgh, Dallas, North-east England, St Petersburg and Hawaii; with up to 12,000 regular readers spread across the globe.  Most of them were in mainland Europe, England, Canada, United States, Republic of Ireland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, with others in the Middle East, across Asia, in Vietnam, China and Australia.

There was a monthly newsletter in English and Spanish as a briefing and gossip loop to PRs, actors, producers, directors, composers, performers, the public, theatregoers, arts enthusiasts, venue managers, promoters, impresarios, journalists, and other industry and showbiz professionals.

Each year there were 25 awards - the Fringe Report Awards - announced in January and presented on any day mid-February that wasn't Valentine's Day.

The first volume of Fringe Report, covering its first two years 2002-2003, was delivered to the Library on 18 December 2014, where it is now uniquely available.  It contains 478 pages of reviews of over 250 shows, plus interviews and articles.  A feature of the book - and of forthcoming volumes - is a comprehensive index of over 4,000 entries including shows, venues, companies and people.  Fringe Report always where possible contained full credits for the shows and events it reviewed or reported, and the index includes the names of 3,000 people involved.

When the whole archive is complete it will comprise 12 books including all published and previously unpublished material, 750 photographs, audio soundtracks of award acceptance speeches (including Sir Arnold Wesker, John Antrobus, Kevin Sampson, Dr Elliot Grove, Kiki Kendrick, Abi Titmuss, Holly Penfield) and film of the several years of the awards.

Amongst the literary treasures held in the basements of the British Library sits an extraordinary collection of sounds.  From recordings of extinct species, voices from the past, to music across all genres, the British Library’s sound archive is held on more than 1.5 million physical items, just waiting to be heard.

But all of these recordings, from those made on the earliest wax cylinders to contemporary CD-Rs, face a real and immediate threat.

Edison 'Concert' wax cylinders in the collections of the British Library

Within 15 years, the combination of physical degradation and the disappearance of the technologies that support physical media will make accessing the nation’s sound archive difficult, and in many cases impossible.  Without taking steps to preserve these recordings now, they will be lost.

These risks face all recorded sound collections, across the country; from boxes of forgotten cassette recordings to professional archives.

To understand the risks facing the UK’s sound collections, the British Library has initiated a project to collect information about our recorded heritage, to create a Directory of UK Sound Collections.

By telling us what you have, we can understand more about the breadth of the nation’s collections and the risks that they face, and this will help us plan for their preservation, for future generations.

Our aim is to be comprehensive; to search out sounds that exist in libraries, archives, museums, galleries, schools and colleges, charities, societies, businesses and in your homes.  And we’re not just interested in large collections: a single item might be just as important as a whole archive.   

So if you think you might have a rare or unique collection of sounds, or just a recording that should be preserved, let us know!

The census is live now and will run until the end of March 2015.  You can read more about the project, and send us information about your collections here: www.bl.uk/projects/uk-sound-directory

Responses have already started to come in, and we’ll be publishing updates on the project, and some of the things we’ve found on this blog, so enter your email address and click the Subscribe button at the top of this page to receive notifications by email.

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.

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

Related articles

Save our Sounds: 15 years to save the UK's sound collections

The UK’s audio collections are under threat. Often created on media that over time has become unstable, they are at risk - both from physical degradation and from the obsolescence of technology to replay them.

Professional consensus is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save the UK’s sound collections before they become unplayable and are effectively lost. The solution is to digitally preserve them, but the scale of the task required is considerable and time is running out.

Digitisation of a 1960s magnetic wire recording

The British Library is home to the national sound archive, an extraordinary collection of 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment from the 1880s to the present day. We need both to ensure that the existing archive is properly preserved and that new systems are developed for the acquisition of future sound production in the UK.

The voice of Florence Nightingale recorded 30 July 1890 on wax cylinder

Save our Sounds is a new programme the British Library has created to answer this imperative need. It has the following aims:

•    to 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 other collections across the UK
•    to establish a national radio archive that will collect, protect and share a substantial part of the UK’s vibrant radio output, working with the radio industry and other partners
•    to invest in new technology to enable the Library to receive music in digital formats, working with music labels and industry partners to ensure their long-term preservation.

You can listen to the kinds of sound recordings that we are preserving for the UK, by visiting our Sounds website at http://sounds.bl.uk. It has a selection of 60,000 sound recordings for all to enjoy, covering the entire range of recorded sounds: music, accents and dialects, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.

This playlist of a dozen tracks starts with an early recording of a Beethoven piano trio, one of the earliest recordings of chamber music, recorded in 1905. The violinist we hear performing was born just 30 years after the  composer's death in 1827.

We have launched the Save our Sounds programme with a major fundraising campaign to digitise and digitally preserve the most fragile and unique recordings. Save our Sounds is one of the key strands of Living Knowledge, the British Library’s new vision and purpose for its future, news of which was announced today by the Library’s Chief Executive, Roly Keating.

Sound recordings document some of our greatest creative endeavours, preserve key moments in our history, capture personal memories, give a sense of local and regional identity and they help us to understand the world around us. And they are extraordinarily powerful in bringing back to life past events: famous speeches, the voices of loved ones and those who have sadly left us, musical and other artistic performances, notable events in recent history and the familiar and exotic sounds of natural and urban environments.

We need to preserve sounds today - to listen to the past tomorrow. So it’s vital that we act now to ensure they are accessible for future generations.

Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision

How to get involved:

• We are mapping the condition of sound archives around the UK to identify threatened collections – if you have a sound collection which you think could be at risk, get in touch and let us know. The census will run until the end of March 2015, and we’re keen to hear from those with private collections as much as the public and commercial archives out there. All you need to know is at www.bl.uk/projects/uk-sound-directory.
• We’ll be issuing updates on this blog, so enter your email address and click the Subscribe button at the top of this blog page to receive notifications by email.
• You can follow us on Twitter via @soundarchive – and do make use of the hashtag #SaveOurSounds
• Please consider your organisation making a major gift to support our programme: http://support.bl.uk/Page/Save-Our-Sounds

More information:

1. Save our Sounds website
2. UK Sound Directory
3. Living Knowledge: The British Library strategy 2015–2023
4. Launching Living Knowledge 12 January 2015
5. “Sounds of the past, ways of the future” (Financial Times, 9 January 2015).
6. British Library seeks £40m to 'save' sound archive (BBC News, 12 January 2015)
7. British Library recording of Florence Nightingale, originally made in 1890.
8. Rare Noël Coward recording rediscovered

Related articles

Seven unique voices saved by the British Library

British Library Fights To Preserve Historic Recordings Archive

The Oral History Curator's Choice collection on the British Library Sounds website was created earlier in 2014 to provide access to some of the CD publications edited and produced by the Oral History section and National Life Stories between 1990 and 2011 (and all expertly edited by the British Library's Sound & Moving Image Audio Engineers). So far publications concentrating on the Post Office, the British food industry, British fashion, the steel industry, the visual arts, theatre design, and writing are available via BL Sounds. Many of the life story interviews from which the extracts were edited are available in their entirety via the Oral History packages on British Library Sounds, but the aim with this Curator's Choice collection is to provide a curated entry point into the collections, and to make these now out-of-print CDs available.

In the following extract from 'Speeding the mail: an oral history of the Post Office', Seumas McSporran talks about the parcel post on the Isle of Gigha, Scotland, in the 1960s, and unusual deliveries, particularly around Christmas:

Seumas McSporran talks about the parcel post on the Isle of Gigha, Scotland, in the 1960s

The extracts in Curator's Choice can be browsed by subject, by interviewee, and by the original CD on which they were published. As some of the publications were narrated the original extracts have been grouped together into clustered themes, such as for 'Connecting Lines' and 'The Writing Life'. In the following screen grab you can see how the notes feature on British Library Sounds can be used to add information about the content of the extract at a specific point in the recording.

The British Library Sounds website (http://sounds.bl.uk) now has 60,000 sound tracks, all freely available for listening online. It represents the most diverse online collection of scholarly sounds anywhere, and also has other interactive features, such as the option to tag and 'favourite' tracks, and to create personalised playlists. These features can be enabled by registering at https://sounds.bl.uk/Account/Register.  Please do register and add your notes to other Curator's Choice tracks.