As you may know from previous blog entries, the Archival Sound Recordings team is always looking for ways to improve the useability and functionality of our site.  This is why we were particularly pleased to join in with the Library’s 21st Century Curatorship visit to the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute in Milton Keynes.

The Knowledge Media Institute was established in 1995 to move the Open University to the forefront of generating, understanding and sharing knowledge through new media.  As organisations such as the British Library expand their traditional services to include giving people remote digital access to their collections, we naturally want to know as much as we can about the whole field. 

Starting the day, KMI Senior Research Fellow Zdenek Zdrahal gave a presentation about Narrative Hypermedia, a concept and technical methodology he has developed to allow people to digitally group collection items that may not be obviously connected.  A visitor to a museum or gallery can thus annotate their visit using a pre-designed ontology and leave a record of their progress behind for other researchers.  This system has been used successfully by the Bletchley Park Museum which has created this readymade example.

In his later years, Humphrey Lyttelton was probably best known as the impossibly dry compère of BBC Radio 4's comedy panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, and for his jazz programme on BBC Radio 2.  But many will also have known him as a talented solo trumpeter and touring jazzband leader over many decades.  In this 1984 interview with Lawrence Stapely, Humph discusses his musical influences, the history of jazz in both Britain and America, the uneasy relationship between intellectualism and spontaneity in jazz, and the need for a national jazz archive.

Please note that this recording has a 30 second audio reference tone at the start.