The scheme will span a period of two years and record interviews with three generations of Moroccan migrants across the UK. Most of the work will be concentrated in London, where up to half of the country's 70,000 Moroccan residents live. 17 field-workers will conduct the interviews, which will ultimately be stored in the National Sound Archive at the British Library.
Project manager Verusca Calabria says: "We needed the best equipment, as this should be a long-term resource for the MRCF. We sought advice from the leading authorities in this field, from the British Library and from Nick Hayes at Inquit Audio. All of the recommendations were for the Marantz PMD660 because it is a robust solid-state recorder, very user-friendly and delivering high-quality uncompressed sound recording."
The units were supplied by Inquit Audio, where director Nick Hayes has been involved with speech recording and oral history for more than 20 years. He describes the PMD660 as "the de facto standard for oral history recordings in the UK."
Verusca Calabria has armed her field-workers with the PMD660s and sent them out into mosques and community centres in London, Edinburgh, Slough, St Albans and Crawley, where the Moroccan community has mainly settled. Interviewers are recording onto the PMD660's compact flash cards, which can store more than 36 hours of mono. Once backed up onto the field-worker's computer, the CF card can be sent to project HQ in west London.
(Jim Evans)
