Week 8: Site Visit 

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport.

The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languagesand in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library’s collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and items dating as far back as 2000 BC. The library maintains a programme for content acquisition and adds some three million items each year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) of new shelf space.

From my perspective, Vinyl would still be the one which live the longest cause actually I had very experience with CDs. When I was young, my father bought me 40 CDs of Disney cartoon stories and documentary films. I loved the shapes and the reflection of them, so I carried them every day, just like a kind of accompany. But the other day, a thief stole all of my CDs when I was shopping with my mum and all of the CDs were away. It was at the age of 5. But I still remembered. It might be the reason that CDs were quite fancy and also my father did mentioned that some of the CDs production quantity were very low. So if I did not cherish them, then he could sell in a very good price. Probably SD cards and hard drives were not very reliable cause they were ‘digital’. Portable things were always easy to break.

We looked at the phonograph, invented by Edison, a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a record. To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener’s ears through stethoscope-type earphones.

We talked about vinyl: What streaming and downloads can’t match is the emotional connection that human beings feel toward this most physical of formats. It may seem completely maddening and illogical to some, but for many enthusiasts, vinyl goes beyond getting a music fix. Music enthusiasts can sometimes be obsessive types, and it has even been reported that Moby compares the ‘warmth’ of vinyl to mother-child bond” There is undeniably, the ‘hands on’ dimension to having a vinyl release in your home, of keeping it on a shelf, of maintaining it and your equipment so it always plays at optimum quality. Then you have the decades of devotion to that shiny black disc and its often bold sleeve designs. Hmm… maybe British people would like to have vinyls because the aesthetics of owning and playing vinyl are glamorised and many huge artists have begun releasing their albums through the vinyl. The quantity was quite low because it is bad for the environment.

But in China, it was very strange cause we had got more vinyl amplifiers than vinyls I supposed. First of all, the production of them were a loads… And we won’t buy vinyls if we won’t listen to them, which was quite ‘practicalism’. We have got more YouTube vinyl amp nowadays…

We looked at how Robin performed reading messages from the tape machine. I was amazed because I did not think I have got the patience of doing it and I would be very anxious if the tape was accidentally tangled. How he generated the sound by the daw was amazing and the patterns on the computer was also very like the models in touch designer. Btw, I really love real things like tapes, vinyls, cassettes, cause there was no much thing we could do once we died. Just like the value of cash, though we avoided using it now because of the pandemic. But it would be a forever thing in the world.