Archival Sound Recording Maps at the British Library

May 14, 2009 11:44 AM

Mapping sound at the British Library.The British Library has organized several of its archival sound collections on Google Maps. The results include Accents and Dialects, wildlife and soundscape recordings from Britain, music from India and Uganda, and a whole mess of noisy frogs.

You can read more about the Archival Sound Recording Project here or on the project blog. This post comes via the JISC Digitisation blog.

posted by LarryC (8 comments total)

Truly awesome. Thanks.
posted by one_bean at 12:18 PM on May 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

Great stuff, but no Scottish. Welsh or Irish accents.
posted by the cuban at 3:10 PM on May 14

Great stuff, but no Scottish. Welsh or Irish accents.

What a pity that is. What would be even better would be a map of English accents all over the world--New York, New Orleans, Belmopan, Nairobi, etc.
posted by LarryC at 4:00 PM on May 14

The BBC has a more representative archive of British accents.
posted by the cuban at 5:00 PM on May 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

Can't have too much of this kind of thing.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:17 PM on May 14

That's it, I'm tied up for the next month. Yay!
posted by chihiro at 6:28 PM on May 14

"Anyone can search or browse the catalogue records. However, for copyright reasons required by the owners of the content, only people in licensed higher and further education institutions, or in British Library reading rooms in London or Yorkshire, can actually play or download the recordings."

Well, it could have been interesting ...
posted by woodblock100 at 9:28 PM on May 14

Everyone can listen to these collections.

I've been on a tour of the Sound Archive, and it was fascinating. They had great stories about finding rare obsolete playback equipment in people's garages, and a very sad story about one very early recording that they knew they would probably never be able to play because the wax disk it was on had been folded up and would break if the unfolded it.
posted by Helga-woo at 10:40 AM on May 15