Newsletter No76 Winter 2008
In this issue:
Our new Online Public Access Catalogue; Bedfordshire & the Slave Trade|; News from the East Of England Sound Archive
The new on-line Public Access Catalogue (OPAC)
Since 2003 we have been putting our catalogues on line and you may have used our Public Access Catalogue presently accessible via the ‘Search Our Catalogues’ |link . This has not been updated since April 2007. Following the introduction of upgraded cataloguing software last April we have been busy specifying how we want our new on-line catalogue to look and getting Bedfordshire County Council IT staff trained by our software supplier, Adlib Information Systems, to put this specification into practice. We hope to launch our brand new on-line catalogue facility in Spring 2008.
The new OPAC will include lots of collections added since last April including all the parish council records and 50% of the parish church collections. We still have quite a long way to go to get all our catalogues on-line – our target is 2013, our centenary year. We are being helped by casual staff who deserve an honourable mention for the hard work they have put in getting to grips not only with the new cataloguing software but also with some of our old catalogues. So our thanks to Sue Fowler, Kay Edwards, Carolyn Donovan, Angela Underhill, Mark Humphries, David Hartley, Remmy Bredban, Caroline Bowdler and Irene Davison.
The new OPAC will be hosted by Bedfordshire County Council. This means that it can be updated more or less instantly and will save us money as we will no longer have to pay for external hosting. On the downside it will have a different web address so if you have our current OPAC as a favourite on your web browser prepare to update it!
Part two of our series on Bedfordshire and the Slave Trade|
News from the East of England Sound Archive Group (EESA)
In May 2007 the East of England Sound Archive Group carried out a survey of sound archive collections in each county in the region. Fourteen respondents in Bedfordshire said that their organisation held sound archives. The number of recordings varies from eight to 400 although between 50 and 150 was most common. Compact audio cassettes are the most popular media with some older ones, such as reel to reel, and some digital such as mini-disc. Half have digital copies of their material as WAV or MP3 files. Supporting documentation is often sparse. Although many organisations have some transcripts and photographs to go with their collections only recent, more formal, projects tend to have the permission forms and content summaries that are vital if the material is to be made widely available in the future.
Oral history is the most common content of the recordings. 13 out of 14 organisations have no proper storage provision for their recordings, which with only 7 of the 14 having back-up copies is worrying, if not surprising. In spite of this 9 of the 14 can provide access to the material, usually by appointment. Most found that few people used the material and several respondents commented that this was probably because its existence was not widely known.
Following on from the survey EESA arranged a training day at Duxford for anyone wishing to know more about looking after their recordings including identification, handling, copying, finding funding for projects and looking after digital files. Creating and copying sound recordings is not difficult but it does require an understanding of intellectual rights as well as of the technology. In addition, high quality digital master files require massive amounts of memory. BLARS does not collect sound archives because we do not have the facilities or expertise required for them. However, after the training day I now have a better understanding and can discuss their needs with anyone who has recordings or who is thinking of creating them.
In Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire the survey followed a similar one carried out ten years previously. The 2007 survey revealed that a sizeable proportion of sound collections known about in 1997 were no longer traceable. If the collections that exist are to survive and be made accessible it is useful for organisations to share information, knowledge and expertise and perhaps facilities and funding and EESA aims to continue to encourage this co-operation.
This extraordinary contraption from 1960 is a Gramdeck. It was used to record things from the radio or microphone using a record deck as the power to turn the reel-to-reel tape. I found this example in 2005 in the loft of my parents’ house. One of the advantages of the Gramdeck was that you could get more on a tape recorded at 33 rpm than on one recorded at 45 rpm, however if you now want to make copies from the recordings this makes things a little more tricky than usual. In spite of notes in my father’s terrible handwriting I am still not sure what is on the two tapes found in the box! Pamela Birch (01234 228833).