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 cataloguing backlogs mean that there are so many treasures that are ‘hidden’ from view and unable to be searched in any of the Library’s catalogues. Unlocking Our Hidden Collections is a concerted effort to bring some of these to light, by targeting specific collections across the Library’s many curatorial areas for detailed cataloguing where previously there was none at all. Collections in this initiative include manuscripts from the medieval to contemporary periods, charters, censuses, photographs, correspondences and music manuscripts. They also include recordings from the British Library sound archive. The project that I work on within Unlocking Our Hidden Collections is entitled ‘Rare and Unpublished World and Traditional Music’, which catalogues and ultimately makes publically available collections of sound recordings that would otherwise remain obscure.
As a cataloguer in this process, I have the absolute pleasure of listening to wonderful recordings of some of the most interesting musical cultures in the world, researching their context and diving into the recordists’ own experiences through their documentation and other material. So far, I’ve worked with collections of recorded music from Thailand, Malaysia, India, Nepal and Kenya from the 1960s to the 2000s, but today I want to highlight one specific collection, the Sue Steward Collection (C1984 in our catalogues).
To read the full blog post and to read more about Sue Steward's wonderful collection and her recordings of Edmundo Ros (that him in the photo up at the top), head over to the British Library Sound and Vision blog.
Photo: Edmundo Ros in Amsterdam, 1957, by Harry Pot.