South West sound archive goes online with 100 rare clips
About 100 rare recordings from the South West, covering dialect, music, spoken history and church services, are now online, with the project aiming to reach around 1,500 clips.
The Full Story
A plain summary built from the channels that reported this story.
A rare sound archive from the South West has been made available online for the first time. The collection brings together music, spoken history, dialect and church services, with about 100 clips currently on the website. The project eventually hopes to host about 1,500 clips.
The recordings capture local life and culture across the region. One clip features an old fisherman from Oldbury-on-Severn explaining how to make putchers and kites, knit a net and handle other fishing work. Others include sea shanties, memories of salmon fishing on the River Severn and recollections of the Cornish dialect. A recording from a man who at the time was booking bands for Bristol's Colston Hall is also included.
The work to put the archive online is painstaking. Recordings come in several formats, including quarter inch reel to reel tape. Harry, who is digitising the material, copied the first recording more than two years ago. The process involves transferring old audio to new technology so it can be preserved and accessed.
John, who is 95, donated recordings of interviews with jazz musicians in the West Country. He said he wanted to make sure the interviews could be heard forever. He added that people should be able to explore the cultures that developed in the city, why they developed and what effect they may have had.
Those behind the project warn that time is limited. The tapes and other formats are fragile, and tape degrades over time. They say there is only a short window before recordings could disintegrate and be lost. Digitising them is therefore important so they can be used and kept for the future.
On screen
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Key Claims
Claims reported during this story's coverage, grouped by how many channels reported each one. Select a dot to see the source excerpt.
| Claim |  |
|---|---|
| Only on one channel | |
| About 100 clips from across the South West are currently available online. | |
| The archive includes music, spoken history, dialect and church services. | |
| The project aims to have about 1,500 clips eventually. | |
Channel Perspectives
What each channel focused on, with key quotes.
This regional BBC segment treated the archive as a local heritage story with a preservation deadline. It highlighted personal donors and specific recordings, including a fisherman from Oldbury-on-Severn and a 95-year-old jazz interviewer. It also gave more technical detail than a short news item, noting quarter inch reel to reel tape and the painstaking digitisation process.
- “These are the sounds of the South West.”
- “It's important because I think people, they should know or they should have the availability to explore the cultures which have developed in the city, why they've developed in the city and what effect they may have had on the city as well.”
- “The critical thing is that these recordings and the formats on which they're recorded are very, very fragile so tape degrades over time and there's only a short window of opportunity left before these tapes will just disintegrate”
Broadcast Timeline
News broadcasts tracked for this story, in time order.