One of the largest Sound archives in the world, based at the British Library, London. The archive was founded after World War II by Patrick Saul, who had visited the British Museum in the 1930s in search of an ex-catalogue record only to find that sound recordings were not preserved there at all – a situation he resolved to remedy. Institutional support was not forthcoming in the 1950s until Decca gave £500 and a Birmingham-based Quaker trust donated £2000. The archive opened as the British Institute of Recorded Sound (BIRS) in 1955 on British Museum premises in Russell Square. From 1961, following lobbying by musicians including Adrian Boult and Myra Hess, the government awarded the archive an annual grant-in-aid. In 1966 it moved to premises in South Kensington; it became part of the British Library in 1983 and in 1997 moved with the library to its new building in St Pancras.
The music collections of the NSA are divided into four sections (Western art music, popular music, jazz, and traditional and non-Western classical musics), each with its own curator. Copies are received of most commercially released British recordings, and the archive purchases recordings from throughout the world. It provides the only public access to the BBC Sound Archives and has itself recorded off-air from BBC networks since the early 1960s. The archive has also received donations from private collectors.
The earliest field recordings held in the NSA are the A.C. Haddon cylinders made in the Torres Straits in the 1890s. Other notable ethnographic collections include those of Jim Carroll and Pat Mackenzie in the UK, a.l. Lloyd in Europe, klaus Wachsmann in Uganda, and Brian Moser and Donald Taylor in Canada. The archive also makes recordings of events including the WOMAD festival and jazz performances in London.
Besides its own catalogue and the catalogues of the BBC Sound Archives, the NSA holds a large collection of discographies, record catalogues and periodicals. Its publications include the Bulletin of the British Institute of Recorded Sound (1956–60) and the journal Recorded Sound (1961–84).