Thursday, October 4, 2012

Heritage Beasts in the Archives #heritagebeasts

#heritagebeasts in SABC Radio Archives 
Today is World Animal Day, and Ask Archivists have organised a Twitter event for archives.

The Twitter hashtag is #heritagebeasts

They call it Beasts in your collections?!

The call:

"Let’s dive into our collections to search for colourful fishes. Let’s make a safari tour through our depots to catch wild animals. Let’s have a stroll through all the bookshelves to discover beautiful insects that hide there. Let’s have a great flight through our storagerooms and catch up with some amazing birds. Make a silent tour at night to spot the very rare unicorn. And let’s show all the animals we found in our depots and collections to the world on World Animal Day!"

The SABC Radio Archives, the audio archives for the radio stations of the national broadcaster of South Africa (SABC), are no exception!

We have our fair share of sounds and programmes about beasts!

A search for "animals" in our Thesaurus results in 147 documents.

In one document of 1980 the sounds of the following are recorded: dove, elephant, hippo, zebra, jackal, frog, lion, heron, rhino, impala, ... (See the snippet that was copied on top.)

A search for "Rhino*" (Rhino/rhinoceros) yields 35 documents.
The wonderful beast that is being slaughtered on a daily basis for its horn!
Most of the programmes are about the conservation of this animal, but we have the sounds of this mighty beast preserved for our heritage in our collection!

It was interesting to look at our collections from this angle!

Have a happy "hunting" in your collections for those beasts!

Thank you Ask Archivists for the initiative!


Post by Karen du Toit, Afrikaans Archivist in the SABC Radio Archives.

1 comment:

  1. I found an interesting recording in the SABC Radio Archives of fish sounds a while ago, made by the man who patented the underwater microphone.

    ReplyDelete

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