About Us: Library
Although you may only hear the voice of one presenter during a programme on HBA, there are others involved, without whom the show would not go on. As most of our programmes involve music, the Record Library (known as the Gram Library in the trade) is vital to the smooth operation of the station.
We have a team of librarians who catalogue the records and help find music to match your requests.
Each record is catalogued by artist and the title of each song. We can then see all the artists who have recorded a particular song, or if you ask for a record by your favourite singer or group, we can see all the songs we have by them. All this takes a lot of work to keep up-to-date. Each day will use a lot of records that have to be filed back into the racks ready for someone else to use.
So each night has a team of people who just file, catalogue and retrieve records. In a station that offers its listeners requests, finding the right record is very important. In recent years, the library has been put onto a computer database, as well as the well-tried card index. We can now search for all the songs with a given word in the title. If Nigel Mansell were to be interviewed, we could find all the records with CAR in their title in seconds.
If you are interested in helping Hospital Radio in its work but do not want to appear in front of a microphone, why not join the library team? There are a few presenters who would be pleased with your help regarding music of yesteryear.
