British Library Archives

By Hazem Jamjoum

From the first commercial audio recordings at the turn of the 20th century to the 1940s, a dozen or so record companies made tens of thousands of audio recordings for sale across the globe to the peoples and diasporas of the southern and eastern Mediterranean regions.* The vast majority of these recordings were of music, but they also included recordings of comedy sketches, political speeches, Qur’anic recitations, and a smattering of other audio forms. Recording companies sought to capitalise on the region’s communal diversity by recording materials in Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Greek, Armenian and other local languages; especially after realising that there was a market for these materials in diaspora communities from the region, particularly in the Americas. Beyond commercial recordings, the region’s audio heritage includes a large volume of one-of-a-kind recordings, such as radio transcriptions prepared for broadcasts, ethnographic recordings, home recordings by amateurs, and so on.

Six records and their sleeves — *_{A sampling of records and their sleeves from UCSB’s Historical Recordings Collection (Photo credit: Heather Hughes)}*

Over a century later, several archives with varying breadths to their collection mandates have identified these recordings as priority areas for collection, preservation, exhibition and digital curation. In this piece, I aim to provide information that could be useful to researchers of the southern and eastern Mediterranean regions who are interested in such things as recording history, cultural heritage, music, and archival practices and provenance. I profile five institutions with some of the most substantial collections of relevance to the history of audio recording in the region: the AMAR Foundation (Lebanon), The Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development-Nawa (Palestine), Centre des Musiques Arabes et Méditerranéennes: Tunisian National Sound Archive (Tunisia), the British Library (UK) and the University of California at Santa Barbara Library (USA).

By Ahmed Shaker

I am an independent researcher working on early Qurʾānic manuscripts and fragments written in māʼil and Kūfī styles, which dates back to the period from the 7th century to the 11 century CE. I blog at quranmss.com. I am fascinated, too, by illuminated and gilded Qurans from later periods such as those in naskhī, thuluth, rayḥānī, biharī, and ṣīnī scripts. I spend most of my time researching, writing, translating, collecting books and volumes, and following-up on recent conferences, symposia, and events associated with the codicological and paleographical studies of Qurʾānic manuscripts. In addition, I tend to make regular journeys to distinguished libraries, museums, and public exhibitions in the Middle East, Europe, and North America to keep myself updated with current literature, look for unexplored materials convenient for publication in my field of interest, not to mention locating out-of-print books and references. This is not always an easy task considering factors such as date of publication, how rare it is, and whether it is available in many libraries or not.

This year, I decided to visit the British Library (BL) in London to explore some of the non-digitized Qurʾānic materials, focusing my eyes on bindings, frontispieces, illustrations, scribal errors, marginalia, and other impressive features of handwritten documents. It was a productive journey as I anticipated it to be. As you may know, the BL has one of the largest and finest collections of Arabic manuscripts in both Europe and North America, with over 100,000 volumes of printed books, periodicals, and newspapers, in addition to more than 15,000 manuscripts works in 14,000 volumes, covering various subject matters. These include Quranic sciences and commentaries, hadīth, kalām, Islamic jurisprudence, mysticism and philosophy, Arabic grammar and philology, poetry, history, science, medicine, and many other subjects and themes. Moreover, the Arabic manuscripts at BL consist of two major collections: the Arabic manuscripts of the old British Museum Library and those of the India Office Library; formerly part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. These two historic collections, in addition to acquisitions made after 1973, were transferred to the newly-formed British Library in 1982.

In this blog post, I will be offering a detailed information guide—supplied by photographs and illustrations—to newcomers to the British Library, so they can thoroughly enjoy the experience and understand some of the requirements and regulations of the library before their arrival.

A large bronze sculpture of Sir Issac Newton displayed on a high plinth in the piazza outside the British Library in London. The work is based on William Blake’s 1795 portrayal of Newton, which depicts him sitting on a ledge while measuring with a pair of compasses (Photo Credit: Ahmed Shaker)

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