Dr Iris Bachmann is Curator of the Latin American Published Collections and has a background of teaching and research in universities across Europe and the Americas. As an academic, Iris has conducted research on Iberoromance languages including Creole languages. Her focus is on language in its concrete historical and social manifestations with special expertise in language practices in the Americas and in the Caribbean. A career change for family reasons combined with her passion for libraries as places of knowledge and learning led Iris to the British Library, where she is bringing academic expertise and networks to her collections and beyond. Iris has published on the history of Creole Studies and Papiamentu, a creole language spoken in the ABC islands. In her research into sound and language practices in audio-visual media she produced another set of publications and turned her interest to the current project tentatively titled ‘Archive(d) Voices: Changing Perceptions of Language in the Age of Recording’.