British Caving Library

Administered by the British Cave Research Association

Editorial Notes and News

The origins and the way ahead

We can thank Dave Cobley for first coming up with the idea of a British Caving Audio Archive.

During early discussions, the most common remark was "It's a pity we didn't do it a year or two ago. We've lost so and so this year...". Unfortunately, this was always going to be the case, whenever it was started. However, it does underline the need to get recordings of some of the key caving figures out there, particularly those who are aging or infirm. There is an enormous wealth of material to collect, and it is not possible for that to be done by one or two people!

We desperately need help from people from every club and every region to help find any existing material that is already out there, and also to start recording those precious memories for posterity.

If we can do that, this could be one of the most informative, and inspirational of all the caving sites on the web. Listen to the recordings already on here, and I'm sure that you'll agree!

In one respect we have been extraordinarily lucky. Geoff Yeadon uncovered some cassettes which contain some fifteen or so hours of recordings made in 1979 in conjunction with Lindsay Dodd. These were made whilst researching for a proposed book to follow the film "The Underground Eiger". They include some irreplaceable recordings from such as Bob Leakey, Eric Hensler, Graham Balcombe and Mike Wooding, as well as from many younger people who are still active today.

Sid Perou
19th February 2009

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank on behalf of the whole caving community those who have generously spent time tracking down their own material and contributed it freely to the archive, and to those who have gone out with a microphone to record valuable material. This would be a poorer site without the efforts of these guys.

Recordings have been contributed by:

Photographs have been contributed by:

Other photographs have also been used, the origins of which have been obscured by the mists of time. We apologise if you believe that we have infringed your copyright, and we trust that you will let us know.

The webmaster has made use of the following external software sources in the construction of this website, and he thanks the individuals and organisations for making their software readily available

• Luka Cvrk - for use of the CSS template used in the construction of this site.
• The PHP Group - for use of their server-side scripting language
• The Oracle Corporation - for use of their Open Source MySQL relational database management system
• James Heinrich - for use of his getID3 library which facilitates the handling of MP3 metatags
• LongTail Video - for use of their JV Player which has been used to embeded the MP3 files

Webmaster
last updated: 21st October 2011

Technical notes

Recordings are held in MP3 format, and their details are stored in a MySQL database accessed from a PHP application. They may be played from within the browser using the embedded JW Player Adobe Flash MP3 player from LongTail Video which requires both JavaScript and the Adobe Flash plugin to be installed. The MP3 tags are created using the getID3 library. The recordings are also available for downloading and playing on external players for those who are unable to access them through their browser.

The web pages have been tested on the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera web browser platforms.

If you wish to post a comment about a recording, do feel free, but note that you will need session cookies to be enabled in your browser. This is to prevent attacks by automated spambots.

Webmaster
last updated: 9th November 2011