The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is a free digital collection maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara Libraries with streaming and downloadable versions of over 6,000 phonograph cylinders manufactured between 1895 and the mid 1920s.
History
The project began in 2002 as a pilot project to test the feasibility of digitizing cylinder recordings on a large scale for preservation and public access and explore issues related to the preservation and digitization of cylinder records. In 2003, the Institute for Museum and Library Services funded the project with a grant for $205,000 and between 2003 and 2005 UCSB library staff cataloged and digitized over 6,000 of the cylinder recordings in the library's collection using an Archeophone, a modern electrical cylinder player designed in France by Henri Chamoux. The website was released to the public on November 16, 2005. Since outside project funding has ended a further 2,000 cylinders have been added to the archive.
Scope of the Collection
The archive consists of a broad range of cylinder records manufactured between 1895 and the mid 1920s. The majority were produced by Edison Records in Orange, New Jersey, but the collection also contains cylinders produced by the Columbia Phonograph Co., Indestructible Records and other companies. The majority of the cylinders in the collection are music and include band recordings, popular songs, vaudeville, opera arias, and music for solo instruments such as banjo, violin and accordion, but the archive also contains speeches, comedic monologues and home recordings.
The archive currently is just the cylinders in the collection of the UCSB Libraries. Other libraries, including the Library of Congress and Bowling Green State University, have contributed cylinders to the project for preservation and digitization as have private collectors. The Project accepts donations of cylinders but at present does not add digital files of cylinders from other collections.
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