News from the British Library

Program: electronic library and information systems

ISSN: 0033-0337

Article publication date: 1 December 2004

41

Citation

(2004), "News from the British Library", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 38 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2004.28038dab.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


News from the British Library

News from the British Library

Historic sound recordings go digital

A major one 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 by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). This significant resource will be made freely available to further and higher education users and will include a wide range of materials, including oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

The overall digitisation programme, being managed by the JISC, represents a total investment of £10 million 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: “This initiative brings together valuable collections and expertise from the British Library under the direction of JISC to allow increased access to electronic resources. Sound recordings represent a massively untapped resource in the field of education. Its possibilities across almost all subject areas are immense. The Web offers a means of widespread access to rare, historic and hugely valuable sound resources and this partnership demonstrates the British Library’s commitment to research and further education.” The British Library Sound Archive is one of the largest in the world. It holds over a million discs, 200,000 tapes, and many other sound and video recordings. It also offers public access to a wide range of specialist publications, books, magazines and journals covering every aspect of recorded sound.

Substantial newspaper archive is planned for the Web

British Newspapers 1800-1900 is a two million pound project, made possible through funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The overall digitisation programme is managed by JISC and is part of a total investment of some £10 million. It is anticipated that national papers to be digitised will include The Morning Chronicle (a reformist newspaper with a young Charles Dickens as a reporter and W.M. Thackeray as art critic) and the Morning Post (who engaged writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth). Regional and local papers will be drawn from all regions of the UK.

In the nineteenth century Britain transformed itself from an agricultural society to an unrivalled commercial, industrial and military superpower with an empire that spanned the globe. British engineers and inventors, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson forged the Industrial Revolution, while social reforms, from the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation and the growing labour movement were to transform the lives of British people. This project will represent these and many other developments and bring them to life through newspaper accounts to provide an extraordinary resource for the further, higher education and research communities.

For further information please contact: Catriona Finlayson, British Library Press Office, London NW1 2DB, UK. Tel: +44(0) 20 7412 7115; Fax: +44(0) 20 7412 7168; E-mail: catriona.finlayson@bl.uk URL: www.bl.uk

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