Recording of the week: Lancashire pride

This week’s selection comes from Rowan Campbell, former PhD placement student who worked on the VoiceBank collection. Cataloguers shouldn’t have favourites… but it’s hard when one person sums up so beautifully what a collection is about! That’s how I feel about this woman from Oldham, who contributed the following words…




Recording of the week: painting people blue in Hull

This week’s selection comes from Holly Gilbert, Cataloguer of Digital Multimedia Collections. Husband and wife, Kārlis and Shirley, talk about the magical experience of being part of photographer Spencer Tunick’s ‘Sea of Hull’ installation in which 3,200 people volunteered to take off their clothes, paint themselves blue and stand in…




The elusive Pathé cylinders of Mary Garden

Page from 1904 Pathé catalogue with Garden as Mélisande (BL collections) By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Soprano Mary Garden was born in Aberdeen in 1874. Her mother was only fourteen years of age when Mary, one of four daughters, was born. The family went to America when Mary…




Dangerous Oral Histories: Risks, Responsibilities and Rewards

Sue Bishop summarises the 2018 OHS/OHNI Dangerous Oral Histories conference.




Recording of the week: Saqi Farooqi (1935-2018)

This week’s selection comes from Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary & Creative Recordings. This week we feature a complete studio recording of the Indian poet Saqi Farooqi reading his work. The reading was made at the British Library almost exactly 10 years ago today. The poet reads in Urdu…