Friday Find: UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive

I’m a big fan of Vinyl. Granted I grew up with vinyl albums and have an extensive CD collection, I’m recently rediscovered the joy of playing vinyl records. I’ve even got some 78RPM records in my collection. However, do you know that the earliest recordings weren’t on flat vinyl platters, but on wax cylinders invented by Thomas Edison?

Well, the University of California, Santa Barbara library has been collecting these cylinders, digitizing their recordings and making them available online on their Web site. There you can listen online, download recordings and even adopt a cylinder in order to help fund the costs of this project. Be sure to check out the Squeezebox Cylinder Recordings playlist while you’re there.

You can find a link to this resource and many others like this on our Resources page.

Image courtesy of http://museumofintellectualproperty.org/

ABOUT MICHAEL SAUERS
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians.