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Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

 

 
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Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
 
 
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The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is a free digital collection maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public university research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system....
 Libraries with streaming and downloadable versions of over 6,000 phonograph cylinder
Phonograph cylinder

The earliest method of Sound recording was on phonograph cylinders. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity , these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph....
s 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.






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The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is a free digital collection maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public university research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system....
 Libraries with streaming and downloadable versions of over 6,000 phonograph cylinder
Phonograph cylinder

The earliest method of Sound recording was on phonograph cylinders. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity , these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph....
s 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
Edison Records

Edison Records was the first record label, pioneering recorded sound and an important player in the early record industry....
 in Orange, New Jersey
Orange, New Jersey

The City of Orange is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the township population was 32,868....
, 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
Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a genre of a variety show prevalent on the theatre in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. It developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrel show, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque....
, opera arias, and music for solo instruments such as banjo
Banjo

The banjo is a stringed instrument developed by Slavery in the United States Africans in the United States, adapted from several African instruments....
, violin
Violin

The violin is a Bow string instrument with four strings usually tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest and highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which also includes the viola and cello....
 and accordion
Accordion

The accordion is a portable box-shaped musical instrument of the hand-held bellows-driven free reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox....
, 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
Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books....
 and Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green State University is a public four-year institution located in Bowling Green, Ohio, United States, about 20 miles south of Toledo, Ohio on I-75....
, 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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