First at-risk Isle of Man sound recordings available online

A total of 600 archive recordings will be released this year

The first 100 archive recordings from the Manx Museum archives have been made available online for the first time.

It is part of the British Library's £9.3m Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project to digitise historic and culturally significant sound files.

Some of the recordings date back as far as the early 1900s.

The museum's collections information manager Jude Dicken said the project would ensure the "preservation" of "at-risk sound archives".

Volunteers from the island, England and South Africa spent more than 660 hours documenting descriptions of the conversations that had been digitised.

Those made available first include memories of the arrival of the island's first automatic fish splitting machine in 1938 and the funeral procession for the victims of the Snaefell mining disaster of 1897.

Ms Dicken said it was important to digitise the recordings as the formats the audio were originally recorded in were now degrading and the machinery to play them on was becoming scarce.

The remaining 500 recordings will be made available online in themed tranches throughout the year.

The releases will be linked to a series of free Lunchtime Listen sessions, where the content of the interviews will be discussed.

The project coincides with this year's centenary of the creation of the Manx Museum in Douglas.