Millennium Memory Bank
Number of items in collection: 396
Short description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank (MMB). Contributors were either recruited from established groups within the community or chosen from responses to appeals broadcast over the radio: 56% of the interviewees were male and 44% female, ranging from five to 107 years old and drawn from a diversity of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. From the outset, the project sought to focus on local, everyday experiences and interviewees were encouraged to reflect on events and change at a community level rather than on the wider world stage.
Long description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank (MMB). Contributors were either recruited from established groups within the community or chosen from responses to appeals broadcast over the radio: 56% of the interviewees were male and 44% female, ranging from five to 107 years old and drawn from a diversity of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. From the outset, the project sought to focus on local, everyday experiences and interviewees were encouraged to reflect on events and change at a community level rather than on the wider world stage.
The informants for the other collection available here, the Survey of English Dialects (SED), were selected for a linguistic survey and chosen specifically to reveal conservative rural dialects. The contributors to the MMB were participants in an oral history project and hence reflect a much wider range of the social spectrum. Although the primary objective was to record thoughts and attitudes rather than speech patterns, the English spoken has an extremely strong community and place-based resonance. The extracts chosen here include over 250 MMB recordings from within five to ten miles of an original SED location, usually much closer, and roughly 100 additional recordings of speakers from key urban sites not included in the SED network. Given the contrasting intentions, scopes and scales of the two collections, the recordings are not strictly comparable, partly because the MMB is far more representative of the urban population. However, an attempt was made to select extracts only from interviews with speakers who had spent most of their life in a particular place and can therefore be said to be representative of that speech community and precedence was given to passages demonstrating particularly noteworthy linguistic features.
The British Library acknowledges the support of BBC Nations and Regions, who have recently completed a nationwide project to chart the current linguistic landscape of the UK.
All recordings on this site are governed by licence agreements.