Recording of the week: adrift on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean

This week’s selection comes from Dr Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance. Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865-1940) was a British physician, medical missionary and humanitarian, who worked on the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, Canada for over forty years. In 1908, on his way to…

In amongst the wildebeest

Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds, writes: In Disney’s The Lion King, the young cub Simba finds himself in the midst of a terrifying wildebeest stampede. Though our little hero survives the ordeal, a stampeding herd of wildebeest is certainly a force to reckon with. Every year during…

Recording of the week: the young Leonard Bernstein

This week’s selection comes from Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Recordings. Leonard Bernstein was born 100 years ago on 25th August 1918. In 1953 the young Bernstein made a series of LPs for the American Decca label. Already with aspirations as a music educator, Bernstein recorded lectures on the…

Recording of the week: working 9 while 5

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. The Oxford English Dictionary categorises the use of while [= ‘until’] as northern dialect and, as this contributor to the Evolving English WordBank explains enthusiastically, such subtle distinctions in the way dialects assign prepositions can cause both confusion…

Recording wildlife in the dark

Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds, writes: There are plenty of positives when it comes to digitising archival sound recordings. Long term preservation and improved access are top of the list, however the opportunity to easily explore thousands of freshly digitised files is a curator’s dream. The library’s…