UCSB's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

In addition to its soon-to-be-unveiled Victor Project (an online discographical database of pre-1950 Victor and RCA label recordings with audio samples, digital images, and advanced search functionality), the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Department of Special Collections has launched some really fabulous online projects with its audio collections in recent years.

First and foremost is the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, a digital collection of nearly 8,000 cylinder recordings. (First mass-produced in the mid-1880s and manufactured well into the 1920s, wax cylinders are the earliest commercial sound recordings.)

The project began in January 2002 as a pilot program for digitizing and creating access to the department’s cylinder recording collection. Its scope was expanded with a major IMLS grant in 2005, and, in 2006 (I believe) it went online. Cylinders continue to be added incrementally as they are digitized. All are freely downloadable or streamable online.

The collection of spoken and musical selections is searchable by keyword, author, title, year, subject, and UCSB Call Number. However, unless one has a knowledge of obscure 19th century wax recordings, the site’s browse feature is perhaps more useful to the researcher, music fan, or cultural historian. The collection is browseable by Ethnic or Foreign Cylinder, Instrument, Topical Subject, and Genre.

For instance, browsing by “banjo” (under instruments) returns a list of 92 such examples from the Department’s collection. Clicking on Vess L. Ossman’s “Cloud Chief,” takes the user to a catalog record where one can listen to (and download) a particular selection as either an MP3 (digitally restored) or a wav (not restored).

The site's overall functionality isn’t necessarily that sophisticated. It works clearly and effectively, however, unencumbered with unnecessary linkage.

Interestingly, there is something of a disclaimer on the site about copyright, one of audio archiving’s traditional albatrosses. The disclaimer concludes only that there is still a great deal of ambiguity, if not tenuousness, in the initiative’s legal clearance:

“All Edison cylinders are presumed to be in the public domain as the assets of Edison Records were transferred to the National Park Service, a federal agency. Other American sound recordings made prior 1972 may or may not be protected by state laws or common-law copyright… The nature of the various state laws and differing interpretations of these laws in state courts means that the legal status of many early recordings is unclear.”

Regardless, the transfers are licensed for public use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License, and users are encouraged to redistribute, reissue, mash-up, or re-mix the transfers.

All catalog records are searchable through the website, as well as through the UCSB Library catalog and the University of California system-wide catalog. The site also has streaming radio programs of its collections and a "featured cylinder" section showcasing some of the most interesting items in the collection.

This is one of the most innovative online projects initiated by an audio archiving institution. To be fair, there aren’t many such projects involving commercial recordings afoot; they tend to be hampered by a lack of funding and, moreover, by restrictive and complicated copyright law.