Post written by Mason Vander Lugt – ARSC Blog Editor / Library of Congress

In the summer of 1947 the British Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB) called a conference to discuss the possibility of forming a comprehensive British national sound archive. It was a victory for a young music lover named Patrick Saul, who had been building the idea since he was a boy.

Saul grew up in Dover in the 1920s, and became interested in music through records and radio due to a lack of options to see serious music locally. In an address to the International Association of Music Libraries in 1973ⁱ, Saul tells how he “became consumed with the idea of establishing an institution” after finding that his local record shop didn’t have a copy of an out of print record he’d read about, and the British Museum didn’t collect records.

A few years later, Saul’s piano teacher introduced him to Frank Howes, president of the Royal Music Association and music critic for The Times. Howes encouraged Saul to pursue his plan, and the pair convinced Lord Esher, who had helped found the National Theatre, Compton MacKenzie, editor of Gramophone, and various other representatives of cultural organizations that the idea was worth pursuing.

In the years following the ASLIB conference, the British Institute of Recorded Sound (BIRS) was pieced together by donations from charitable trusts and arts councils. The team convinced the BBC and rights organizations of the legitimacy and importance of private recording of broadcasts and convinced the treasury to waive duty on imports and tax on domestic donations. In 1953 the Institute began hosting a series of public lectures and in 1956 began publishing the Bulletin. In 1961 the Institute began receiving public money for continued operation and in 1983 was officially absorbed by the British Library to become the National Sound Archive.

The BIRS Bulletin and its successor Recorded Sound contain a wealth of information about audio archiving and related disciplines. Topics range from British composers and orchestras to wildlife recording, from major label discographies to the minutiae of cataloging and audio production. Especially interesting to me are the years between the first issues of Bulletin and the inauguration of the ARSC Journal in 1967. In this span, Bulletin and Recorded Sound documented the formation of some of the most treasured American audio collections, including those of the New York Public Library and Stanford, Yale and Indiana Universities.

I’ve prepared an index of Bulletin and Recorded Sound to help researchers discover articles on their own topics of interest, but I encourage curious ARSC readers to browse the index for their own interests and consider tracking down issues of the journals in their local libraries. I intend to reproduce a few of my favorite articles here in the next few weeks but if you’re looking for something to read or listen to in the meantime, consider taking a moment to browse British Library Sounds, or the web archive of their later publication ‘Playback’.

Download “An Index of British Institute of Recorded Sound publications Bulletin and Recorded Sound, 1956-1984” (30 MB)

Just for fun – Ian J. Strange records penguins and albatrosses in the Falklands ca. 1974 for the British Library of Wildlife Sounds (BLOWS), a department of BIRS. Photo from ‘Recorded Sound’ no. 54.

ⁱ Reprinted in issue 52 as “Some notes on the Institute’s pre-history”, pp. 230-236