Sound and vision

The collection comprises commercial discs, tapes of BBC and other radio broadcasts, test pressings, and rare or unpublished recordings donated by composers, performers and private collectors. Some UK record companies donate copies of their new releases and labels based in other countries are bought selectively. In addition to recordings of performances, we also have speech and documentary programmes of all kinds as they relate to classical music collections and subject.

Our primary aim is to provide a representative overview of the UK music industry and its many and varied constituent scenes, covering both the high-profile mainstream outputs of the major labels as well as the less visible products of the UK’s independent sector. We collect published products as widely as possible, and private, unpublished material more selectively. We acquire audio interviews and radio broadcasts, live performances and demos, and make our own recordings at festivals and other events.

One of the world's largest collections of published and unpublished recordings of music from all over the world, dating back to as early as 1898. We collect sound and moving image recordings of music variously defined as traditional or folk, including from the British Isles, as well as popular and art music from across the globe. We hold unpublished collections of original field recordings made by leading scholars and music researchers, including a large collection of historic ethnographic recordings on wax cylinders and other early formats. Field notes and photographs often accompany these collections.

We aim to collect all specialist UK commercial releases of world and traditional music and selected recordings published in other countries, including rare items published only in the country of origin. The collection also includes recordings of live music performances in the UK, and since 1985 we have been recording at leading world music festival WOMAD UK. Listen to selections from our collection on our NTS radio show.

We collect audio and video recordings of poetry, prose, drama, live art, stand-up comedy and sound art. Our holdings span more than 100 years of material from the UK and around the world. Alongside performance documentation and author readings, we hold critical and discursive material: symposia, talks, interviews, panel discussions, and oral histories capturing how practitioners, critics, and audiences have responded to and interpreted literature and performance over time. Further material comes from private collections, the BBC Radio sound archive, and the British Library live recording programme. This includes live performance audio recordings of the productions of leading theatres and companies, and video recordings of experimental and fringe theatre shows and live art.

The collection focuses on spoken voice recordings that can be used for a variety of linguistic research purposes and for exploring English accents, dialects, and language variation and change. It comprises unique unpublished sound recordings relating to several significant nationwide surveys of regional speech in the UK.

Selected dialect content is available on SoundCloud, including a full set of recordings from the Survey of English Dialects. 386 recordings, made from the 1950s to the early 1970s by researchers at the University of Leeds, are available in playlists arranged by county.

The British Library’s oral history collection is one of the largest in the world and covers a huge range of topics encompassing diverse voices, from artists to steelworkers, doctors to postmen, Holocaust survivors to authors. We collect audio interviews, with some complementary content on video, and suitable original oral history material that provides insight into aspects of UK personal memory, identity and experience.

We conduct our own programme of life story recordings and run a training programme for oral history through the Library’s long-term partnership with National Life Stories. We work with oral history projects around the UK to bring new recordings into the Library’s collections.

This is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of wildlife and environmental sound recordings in the world, including examples from all the animal groups and biogeographical regions that make up our planet. Most of these recordings are unpublished and unique to the British Library. The section also includes an extensive collection of commercial releases that collectively chart the history of published wildlife sound recording from 1910 to the present day. Recordings are often complemented by a variety of printed resources including fieldnotes, photographs, discographies and personal papers. Curated programmes that highlight areas of the collection can be listened to on our NTS radio show and playlists featuring the sounds of Britain's wildlife can be explored on Soundcloud, covering:

• songbirds
• non-songbirds
• mammals along with other animals.

The core collection of radio recordings aims for a representative record of all aspects of UK radio today, including commercial, regional, community and specialist radio, and a more complete archive of the UK’s historical radio legacy. They are assembled by selective off-air recording since 1963, augmented by acquisitions from radio stations, producers, performers, musicians, researchers, radio enthusiasts and collectors. You can access BBC Sound Archive content on request at the British Library.

The National Radio Archive is a digital radio archive, based primarily on off-air recording, which preserves a representative proportion of ongoing UK radio output (emphasising speech-based content). It covers up to 50 radio stations providing a representative mix of national/regional, public sector and commercial radio from across the UK. Some examples include Radio Reverb (Brighton), BCB106.6 (Bradford) and Resonance FM (South London). The access service for the NRA is still under reconstruction following the cyber-attack in 2023. Once reinstated, content will be available in the Reading Rooms.

Our broadcast news service provides onsite access, via computers in our Reading Rooms, to recent television and radio news programmes. Following a cyber-attack these are also not available at the moment.

Primarily on video formats, our collection priorities are based around news and current affairs; performing arts, including drama and live art; and performances of musical traditions from around the world.