BBC Gives British Library
Audio Record of 20th Century
The BBC has presented the British Library with all the material gathered for The Century Speaks, a 16-week series of interview programs that each of the BBC’s local radio stations produced in 1999 to create an audio record of the 20th century.
The series comprises more than 6,000 recordings of the loves and lives of ordinary people, according to the May 17 BBC News, which called the collection “the world’s largest oral history archive.” The interviews were gathered under 16 broad subjects such as living together, crime and the law, getting older, and eating and drinking.
The project “has given thousands of ordinary people the chance to record their memories of a vanished or fast-vanishing Britain,” said John Ashworth, chairman of the British Library Board. “Historians will in the future find it invaluable.”
The recordings will be stored in the library’s National Sound Archive, where visitors will use a jukebox-style sound bank to hear excerpts from the collection.
Posted May 22, 2000.
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