Bristol Archives and Archives South West have been awarded money from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to digitise at-risk audio collections. Organisations across the southwest of England will take part in the project called Sounds of the South West.
Dorset History Centre has put forward over 150 materials for digitisation including audiocassettes, vinyl, and reels.
Some of these include interviews and music items related to entertainment and cinema from the Peter Dyson collection. The interviews recollect picture houses in Lyme Regis, Poole, Wareham and Westbourne as well as the RAF cinema corp.
We’ve also digitised audiocassettes from the Bournemouth Transport Ltd / Yellow Buses archive collection. This includes radio adverts for the company, as well as a recording of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra performing ‘Rhapsody in Yellow’.
There are many more audio collections being catalogued as part of this project and the recordings will be available soon.
Audiovisual materials are extremely at-risk and are a priority for digitisation. If you want to learn more, Bristol Archives have been leading this project and have published their own information online. Find out more about the project and the importance of preserving at-risk media collections.
