The nights have drawn in, the temperature has fallen and it’s time to review the past six months at EMOHA.

The major news is that the Sounds for the Future project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, has come to and end (almost). We had a celebration event at the end of October, but are going to be spending the next few months travelling around Leicestershire, Rutland and the East Midlands giving talks and holding events to spread the word about EMOHA, oral history, and sound preservation. If you or your heritage organisation are interested in booking a talk or event contact us for more information via emoha@le.ac.uk.

So, what has Sounds for the Future achieved? For the first time since the 2000s, all our collections are digitised and catalogued. The links below take you to a selection of new online resources.

A new catalogue (for EMOHA). Our collections are now part of the University of Leicester’s Archives & Special Collections catalogue.

More than 250 oral history recordings are online for the first time at Special Collections Online. These include a selection of the compilation recordings created by the Leicester Oral History Archive in the 1980s.

We have created new learning resources for schools. Aimed at KS3 students, these use oral histories to look at WW2 (see video below), migration to the UK, and the influenza pandemic of 1918/19.

Using this new map of EMOHA’s collections you can see where in the region our collections have come from.

The Life of a Sound Archive looks at what we do at EMOHA and features interviews with the Sounds for the Future team.

Wildlife Sounds is a celebration of the work of sound recordist Phil Rudkin whose archive of wildlife recordings we accepted recently.

Particularly exciting has been preserving large oral history collections from Northampton Central Library. These were recorded in the 1980s and 1990s, cover both the town and the county, and are a rich resource for local history in Northamptonshire. Details are on our catalogue.

We have also accepted some new collections. As well as Phil Rudkin’s recordings, we have received the Leslie Land collection of evangelical sermons from Melbourne Hall, Leicester, recorded in the 1950s and 1960s. We also have recordings from the St Philip’s Centre’s ‘Memories of Living Well Together’ project. This comprises oral histories with people from a wide variety of national/ethnic/religious backgrounds who live in Leicester and talk about living in the City.

We continue to support projects with help, advice and training, including recent sessions with heritage projects at Bassetlaw CVS and the Aveland Archive.

We would like to extend our best wishes for the festive season to all our readers. One of the recordings we have recently put online for the first time is a collection of memories of Christmas Past, which is an appropriate way to take us into 2024.