Today’s selection comes from Emmeline Ledgerwood, Discovering Science website co-ordinator. Sixty years ago, on 1 Oct 1963, the then Labour party leader, Harold Wilson, delivered his famous ‘white heat’ speech at the Labour party conference in Scarborough. In this speech he outlined the party’s plans to harness a ‘scientific revolution’…

The Sıbızğı Recordings from Northern Xinjiang Coll…

Photo of the inside of Maze Prison, licensed under CC BY 2.0. The clips for this Recording of the Week come from Pat Sheehan’s 2019 interview in the Voices of Our National Health Service collection. The 3rd October 2023 marks thirty-two years since the end of the 1981 hunger strikes…

In March 2022 a full set of digital copies of recordings of ‘Damara-Nama’ musics now archived in the British Library was returned to the Indigenous rights holders in Sesfontein, north-west Namibia. These recordings were made in 1999 by French ethnomusicologist Emmanuelle Olivier, assisted by the late Minette Mans, an ethnomusicology…

Above: Edmundo Ros in Amsterdam, 1957. Photo by Harry Pot. The Unlocking Our Hidden Collections initiative is the British Library challenging itself. With over 170 million items in the Library’s collections and an average of over 8,000 new items added every day, it is impossible to keep up. Processing and…