If you enjoy music, nature, history or anything that's good about the world, you're going to want to pay attention right now.
For years, the British Library has worked to preserve and archive some of the U.K.'s most important recordings throughout history. Through the online database British Library Sounds, you can listen to 60,000 recordings that run the gamut from art to oral histories to world accents. That's only a fraction of the 6.5 million recordings the British Library has, recorded from the 1880s up to today. Right now, you can listen to the likes of Lawrence Olivier, J.R.R. Tolkien and Mahatma Gandhi with just the click of your mouse.
However, that might not always be the case. The British Library announced on Monday that it is crowdfunding support for a new endeavor to preserve the sounds already in its library and make way for new ones. The project, aptly titled Save our Sounds, aims to preserve as many of the nation's recordings as possible, create a national radio archive that will collect, protect and share the U.K.'s radio broadcasts and invest in new technology that will enable them to use new audio formats.
The Save our Sounds program consists of two main measures. One is the U.K. Sound Directory, which is an effort to survey all Britons about the types of recordings they have. The British Library wants to know all about the "collections" you have, specifically of the "rare" or "unique" variety, "recordings that are known to exist in small numbers, and those that exist nowhere else." I doubt that means the British Library is interested in the drunken voicemail you sent to your ex, although I'm sure it was truly one of a kind.
The British Library plans on publishing the census in April 2015. It's intended to be a directory of all of the recordings the country has, at least the ones we know about.
If you feel like a financial contribution to these efforts is more your speed, you can also donate to support the project. This might be the way to go if you don't live in the U.K. and don't have much to contribute in the area of the nation's recordings.
Apparently, the consensus is that we only have about 15 years to digitize our sound collections before they become unreadable and we lose them forever, according to the British Library's statement. If that ever did happen, all future generations would know about our aural history would probably just be like One Direction or something. Nobody really wants that to happen, right?
