Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Cylinder music recordings (the first commercial recordings) were produced in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. In an effort to preserve this period in the history of music, UC Santa Barbara Libraries, with funding from IMLS, has digitized most of over 7,000 cylinder recordings and made them freely available online.

Selection Decisions
About 6,400 of the physical collection has been made available online. In some cases, the cylinders were so moldy or damaged so as to be uncapturable. These cylinders have been gathered from donors and existing collections at UCSB. However, the library has not yet partnered with other libraries that have cylinder collections. The initial grant (2005) allowed for 5,000 cylinders to be digitized and they have been added incrementally since then. Given there date, all of the songs are in the public domain.

Metadata
Users can browse or search across the collections. The browse option allows one to search by genre, instrument, topical subject, or among ethnic and foreign cylinders. The search option allows one to search by keyword, title, subject, author, or year. Each song is accompanied by a basic catalog record including the performer, year of release, subject, collection, etc.

Object Characteristics
For each recording, users can choose a streaming recording of the song, or they can download the song. Downloadable songs are available in both MP3 Unedited 24-bit WAV formats. The streaming songs use Apple’s Quicktime format. While the sound of the cylinders has been captured, the digitizers have not captured the objects themselves. Perhaps digitized images of the cylinders and their labels would be even more useful. There is also an option for a live stream of cylinder recordings through “cylinder radio.”

Audience
The audience for this collection could be anyone from a casual internet surfer to a researcher interested in turn-of-the-century music. There is a FAQ section for the less-technically-proficient.