Projects

Unlocking our Sound Heritage was a UK-wide project that will help save the nation’s sounds and open them up to everyone.

Published date:

27 July 2023

Background

The British Library is home to the nation’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment. These recordings, from the UK and around the world, date from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present day. The sound archive forms a vital part of the nation’s collective memory and tells a rich story of the diverse history of the UK.

However, sound items are under threat, both from physical degradation, and as the means of playing them disappear from production. Professional consensus internationally is that time is running out to save many of our sound collections. There is an urgent need to preserve as much as possible in the next decade before they become unreadable and are effectively lost.

The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project – part of the Save our Sounds programme – aimed to preserve and provide access to thousands of the UK's rare and unique sound recordings: not just those in our collections but also key items from partner collections across the UK.

The project

This was an ambitious UK-wide project, delivered between July 2017 and March 2023. The funders were the National Heritage Lottery Fund (NHLF), the Foyle Foundation and the British Library’s grant in aid. The British Library led the project, in partnership with ten regional and national museums and libraries from across the UK. Together we preserved, digitised, catalogued, and copyright cleared the most vulnerable recordings across the United Kingdom. The key objectives of the project were to:

• Preserve: Transform access to and preserve the UK’s most vulnerable and at-risk audio heritage.
• Awareness: Raise awareness of the importance and value of the nation’s sound heritage.
• Expand: Create sustainable centres of excellence in digital audio preservation around the UK.
• Engage: Involve new audiences in engaging with their audio heritage in innovative ways.

You can read about the projects outcomes in the evaluation reports.

Find out more about Unlocking Our Sound Heritage

Visit our Sounds website, which includes over 120,000 sound recordings for you to enjoy, covering the entire range of recorded sounds: music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.

There is more information on the Sound archive on our Help for Researchers pages, including how to order and listen to collection items in our Reading Rooms. 

Follow us on Twitter @soundarchive and keep up with the latest news on Sounds through our Sound and vision blog.

For further information about the Sound archive and the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project, contact sound-archive@bl.uk.