Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project (review)

One of the difficulties teachers and scholars have faced when trying to integrate into their work recordings made before the LP era is simply the matter of access. Tim Brooks's recent study commissioned by the National Recording Preservation Board, Survey of Reissues of U.S. Recordings (http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub133abst.html) revealed that rights owners of pre-LP recordings have released on CD only nine percent of the total recordings made in genres of most interest to scholars. This percentage shrinks to nearly zero for recordings made before 1920. There are only a handful of institutions in the world that have maintained comprehensive collections of historical recordings in all formats, and unless one works at such an institution, it can be at best difficult, not to say expensive, to obtain copies of early recordings. Unlike many paper materials from archives that we are used to obtaining with relative ease on microfilm (and more recently in digital formats), the legal conundrum that surrounds the copyright status of pre-1972 sound recordings has further inhibited access and use of these materials, even those from the earliest days of commercial recording.

Launched in November 2005, the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara makes available their considerable collection of cylinder recordings, now numbering over 6,000 titles (many with multiple takes). While not the first attempt to provide online access to early recordings—the Edison National Historic Site (http://www.nps.gov/archive/edis/edisonia/sounds.html), The Virtual Gramophone: Canadian Historical Sound Recordings (http://www.collectionscanada.ca/gramophone), and the Library of Congress' American Memory Edison (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html) and Berliner (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlhome.html) projects come to mind—this is the first large online collection of recordings without the limitations of a single recording company or country of origin. As such, this collection is a more balanced look at the recorded output on cylinders from the earliest days of the commercial record industry until Edison ceased recording operations in 1929. No 78 rpms or discs are digitized, although many Edison cylinders were dubbed from Edison Diamond Disks. This is also the largest collection of digitized historical recordings available on the Web; the Virtual Gramophone, by comparison, has almost 4,600 discs and cylinders.

There are several supplemental components of the site. One resource of general interest is a brief but reasonably accurate history of the cylinder as a recording medium, including information on many labels other than Edison. Other links lead to local information such as an overview of the project, UCSB's Special Collections, contact information, a page about donating recording collections, and a FAQ page. Access to the recordings themselves is provided through browsing and searching mechanisms.

The browse page makes for a fascinating taxonomy of cylinder recordings. Based not on LC Subject Headings, but on a more intuitive, natural scheme such as a record collector might use, the reader can begin to discern the varied kinds of repertoire that were offered to the record buying public in the first decades of recorded sound. Under the heading, "Whistling," for example, we find forty-seven examples (including the prolific Joe Belmont whistling, among many other selections, the "Anvil Chorus" from Il trovatore). "Minstrel Music" brings up twenty-nine selections recorded between 1898 and 1914. A wide variety of ethnic humor is represented, of course, as are Hymns (106 selections, differentiated from the 274 recordings listed under the Sacred music heading), Hawaiian guitars (twenty-three), Speeches (fifteen), and numerous ethnic and foreign cylinders. For the ultimate in browsing, the feature titled "Cylinder Radio", when available, is like putting the collection on permanent shuffle in one's iPod. There are also several curated playlist collections, including the entirety of the December 1908 Edison Advance List for dealers (curated by Patrick Feaster), Deutsche Komische Zylinder, Early Black Artists and Composers (curated...