In 1995, the British Library began documenting oral histories of British architects through the National Life Stories series Architects’ Lives. The following year the project looked close to home and published an interview with the architect of the library’s St. Pancras location. In twenty-seven parts available on the BL’s Sounds…

UOSH Volunteer and poet Amy Evans Bauer invites you to write your own creative response to the WordBank: Calling all listers, logophiles, poets, crossworders and puzzleers! The sheer variety of spoken English in the UK and beyond befits a celebration in kaleidoscopic form, so we’ve decided to host our first…

This week’s selection comes from Tom Miles, Metadata Coordinator for Europeana Sounds. This song, recorded in Kamuli, Uganda in 1954 by the pioneering ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann, is of two ntongoli players, Kaija and Isake Ibande, from the Soga culture. Abe Waife (BL reference C4/39) The ntongoli is a type of…

British Library Volunteer, Dr Amy Evans Bauer, writes: Have you ever had trouble explaining the definition of a word, and even more so, conveying an idiom in literal language? An idiom is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as: a form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way…

This week’s selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds. The sound archive is home to over 250,000 wildlife recordings from all over the world. Over 100,000 of these are recordings of birds. As a curator it’s impossible to have a favourite when surrounded by so many…