On 15-16 May Manchester Central Library will host the annual British and Irish Sound Archives conference. What does this involve and why should you get your ticket booked by 30 April?
First up we’ll be leading delegates on tours of Central Library including:
- The secure strongrooms where our archives live
- The searchroom which will be full of sound-related archives including the Free Trade Hall diary from 1966, Chris Sievey’s Casio keyboard, Paul Graney’s sketchbooks and other treasures of Manchester’s musical heritage
- The Archives+ exhibition area including Gorge House Trust and Piccadilly Radio exhibition material
- Our Sound & Vision pods which are crammed with digitised sound and film archives of every description
- The soon-to-be unveiled Piccadilly Radio mixing desk (which may bear a very strong resemblance to the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage listening desk!)
- The jaw-dropping Reading Room and Henry Watson Music Library
- The sound archive and North West Film Archive conservation studios where you can learn more about how we preserve and digitise tapes
Next up we’ll have a welcome from our boss Neil MacInnes OBE and a couple of songs from special guest singer Jennifer Reid. And some lunch.
Then it’s straight into workshops – you have a choice here:
- Iain Betson of AV Resilience will give an introduction to purchasing and maintaining reel-to-reel machines with one of our Studer reel-to-reels – this will be of interest to anybody who might be interested in buying analogue audio kit or anybody already involved in using it. Iain services our reel-to-reel machine and he is an excellent teacher.
- Mary Stewart and Charlie Morgan from the Oral History department of the British Library will run a workshop on Data Protection and Oral History – this will be of interest to project managers, oral historians and archivists who might wish to submit real-life dilemmas for the presenters to advise on.
Then we’ll have a coffee break while the fantastic Caro C and Zolatec tune up for their Delia Derbyshire-inspired performance.
On the Friday we’ll hear from local PhD researchers Suzie Cloves and Cameron Naylor on what they have learned about how sound heritage might work both inside and out and about in between buildings.
After this we’ll have a bit more coffee and three short presentations about current sound heritage work followed by a panel Q&A:
- Katie Scaife and Mary Milton on the excellent Sounds of the South West Heritage lottery project
- Charlie Morgan and Kate O’Neill from the Oral History Society on the findings from their recent survey of local-authority-held oral history
- And me banging on about Piccadilly Radio and other things that are happening in the North West
After a break for lunch (which is where our funds run out!) we’ll reconvene for the BISA Annual General Meeting. We will be using our AGM as a chance to update and discuss plans on how BISA can continue to support people working with sound archives. This will include:
- an update on progress made by the BISA working party on the future of BISA in 2024
- an introduction to the network, resources and guidance we can share with each other
- an introduction to a plan and discussion around training and meeting programme for 25/26.
You can buy two-day tickets for £55 waged or £20 unwaged, or one-day tickets for £27.50 or £10. But you have to do it by next Wednesday 30 April!
These conferences are absolutely vital for those who work in sound heritage to connect and share knowledge. But they’re also really fun, informal events which might be of interest to local students or anybody else who would like some ideas about what to do with that box of tapesin the corner that you’ve been ignoring.
Here’s the full programme. Tickets are on Eventbrite. See you there!