MicDropFor heritage & cultural partners
Let people hear history where it happened
MicDrop is exploring partnerships with archives, museums, universities, cultural organisations, artists and communities that want to connect recorded stories with place.
The proposition
A collection doesn’t have to end at the archive door
MicDrop can provide a new public access layer, letting people encounter selected recordings while walking through the places those voices describe. The recording stays where it is preserved. What changes is where it can be heard.
The archive protects the story. MicDrop puts the voice back into the world.
Scope
What a MicDrop collection could look like
Imagine a living oral history of a city: stories distributed across its streets, parks, houses, workplaces, venues, coastline and landscape. Not a prescribed audio tour. A layer of voices that people discover as they move through the place itself.
A project might combine
- newly collected oral histories
- existing archive recordings
- personal and community collections
- local history
- music and cultural traditions
- folklore and intangible heritage
- commissioned work from artists and storytellers
Each contribution carries its own attribution, context and provenance, and each is labelled by type, so a listener can tell first-hand testimony from a family memory, and both from curated interpretation.
Where we fit
Preservation and discovery are different jobs
What an archive does
Good oral history needs careful collection, informed consent, documentation and long-term preservation. It needs people who know how to do that, and institutions built to hold a record for decades. We don’t think MicDrop should replace any of that, and we’re not asking anyone to move a collection.
What MicDrop does
We want to work with professional archives, researchers and heritage partners who preserve the record properly, while MicDrop creates a new way for the public to encounter it: in the street, on the seafront, on the hill, at the door of the building the recording is about.
Practicalities
How we’d expect to work with you
These are the commitments we would want written into any pilot. If your organisation needs something different, tell us and we will start from your terms rather than ours.
You keep the collection
The holding institution remains the system of record. MicDrop hosts a copy for playback under an agreed licence, not a transfer of rights or custody.
Consent leads
Nothing goes on the map unless the consent under which it was recorded covers this kind of public access. Where it doesn’t, the answer is to re-consent or leave it out, not to publish and hope.
Attribution is not optional
Contributor, collection, date and rights travel with the recording and are shown to the listener. Where a story is interpretation rather than testimony, it says so.
Withdrawal on request
A partner, a contributor or a contributor’s family can have a recording taken down, without having to give a reason and without argument from us.
An exit that works
If MicDrop stops, a partner should get their material and its associated metadata back in an open format, and nothing should be stranded inside our database. This belongs in the agreement, not in a conversation.
Evaluation you can use
Plays, places, reach and route data, reported back in a form you can put in a funder’s evaluation, subject to the privacy limits in our privacy policy.
An idea we’d like to test
A possible first demonstrator
Nothing below has been agreed with any institution, and no organisation named or implied here is a MicDrop partner. This describes what we would like to build with the right partners, so that a conversation has something concrete to start from.
A living oral history of Brighton and Sussex, told in place.
Imagine voices distributed across the seafront, the Lanes, neighbourhood streets, music venues, workplaces, the Downs and the communities that have shaped them. Older residents alongside younger ones. Formal oral history alongside music, folklore, memories and curated interpretation. A public cultural record that grows rather than ending when the project does.
We are interested in talking to organisations, researchers, communities and funders who could help build an exemplar of what place-based oral history can become. That includes being the applicant on a bid where MicDrop is the delivery partner rather than the beneficiary.
Where we actually are
The state of things, plainly
- The app works and is in beta. Drops are pinned to real coordinates, unlock on physical proximity, and play offline once heard.
- The map is seeded, not collected. Almost everything on it today is local history researched from public sources and performed in synthetic voice by MicDrop’s own narrator characters, across parts of England, Australia and the United States. Every one of those is labelled as ours.
- There are no partner collections on it yet. No archive, museum, university or funder is involved in MicDrop at the time of writing. That is exactly what this page is for.
Talk to MicDrop about a collection or a pilot
Whether you hold ten recordings or ten thousand, we’d like to hear what you have and where it belongs. An exploratory conversation commits you to nothing.
Email guy@findmicdrop.com. If it’s easier, send a link to your catalogue and we’ll come back with what we think is possible.