Plea for a sight and sound archive

Sir Anthony Kenny's article recommending the extension of legal deposit to the British Library to include non-print materials (THES, Multimedia Supplement, March 8) prompts a further suggestion.

If legal deposit included provision for the building of a sound and film archive, then I hope that the British Library considers building up a special collection of folklife material such as that held by the Library of Congress in the United States capital Washington DC.

The Folklife special collection at the Library of Congress contains more than 40,000 hours of recordings on cylinders, discs, wires and tapes dating back to 1890.

ALEXANDER CHABLO Fellow Royal Anthropological Institute