The aims of the placement at British Library were:
- To produce a status report on the collection, including how much has been digitised and the status of cataloguing
- Producing a report on a pathway to clearing the collection for online access
- Writing for the British Library Sound and Moving Image blog
For the first aim I did an audit and presented my findings in a spreadsheet. The creation of this audit included searching through both analogue and digital files. The audit has given the staff at The British Library a better idea of what material still needs to be catalogue, digitised, and ingested, and which recordings need be to prioritise within each of these. For example, I found a handful of mini-discs which are harder to digitise then cassette tapes. The second aim of the placement lead me to create another audit, this one specifically about the copyright status of all the recordings in the catalogue. This was a long and tedious process which took up most of my time during this placement. It required me to be very thorough and rigorous as I had to repeatedly go through the recordings accompanying documents in order to check and double check whether the recording had copyright or not. In the end the auditing process produced one very large spreadsheet, containing information on all the recordings, and a spreadsheet for each individual National Trust property which had a recording without copyright. In addition to noting whether a recording had copyright or not I also had to work out whether an item could be an orphan work. Doing these two audits help me better understand the workflow within an archive and what is needed to make archival material accessible. In addition, to these two audits I also created a guide to what I had done so the person who next works on the National Trust’s sound collection can easily understand what I did and why. This was a very helpful exercise as it made me think about how you might communicate across project periods or other long periods of time and ensure work and information is not lost or repeated.
Overall this placement gave me a better idea of The British Library and the National Trust’s relationship surrounding oral history story. The National Trust sound collection is the second biggest in the archive and the recordings span nearly 40 years, so there is a great variety in needs when it comes to preservation and steps to make material accessible. The work I did while on this placement has become a foundation for further projects based around the National Trust sound archive, including the further cataloguing of analogue and digital material, and the development of a three-month PhD placement which will involve developing a workflow for National Trust sites to obtain the correct copyright forms and help The British Library in getting closer making the recordings publicly available.
Finally, I also wrote a report on the status report on the collection to share with both National Trust and British Library staff and have also written a blog post on the contents of the collection after I spent the last week listening to a handful of recordings.