This week’s selection comes from Steve Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary and Creative Recordings. Ntozake Shange, November 1978, by Barnard College; digitally restored by Chris Woodrich. CC BY-SA 3.0 This week’s selection features the American playwright and poet Ntozake Shange (1948-2018), recorded at the ICA, London, 14 March 1984. The…

This week’s selection comes from Andrea Zarza Canova, Curator of World & Traditional Music. You may be familiar with the tapestry featured in this photograph if you visit the British Library every now and then. If its bright colours and mysterious symbolism haven’t lured you in before, it’s a tapestry…

The British Library has been very lucky to have Catherine Smith volunteering with our World and Traditional Music team over the last year. As part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, Catherine worked closely with various collections of sound recordings made on the African continent, classifying musical instruments featured in several…

This week’s selection comes from Charlie Morgan, Oral History Archivist. Today marks Holocaust Memorial Day, as well as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. The National Life Stories oral history project ‘Living Memory of the Jewish Community’ includes many Holocaust survivors describing their experience of Auschwitz…

This week’s selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds. Rainforests are noisy places, even after dark. This recording was made in one of the Amazon’s many várzea or floodplain forests, in the dead of night, by wildlife sound recordist Ian Christopher Todd. Based in a boat…