Wax Cylinder Archive

[TKoP]

An uncle of mine has a pretty decent collection of old -- for the most part, they're 78s -- records. He also has more than a few old cylinder records, with the players for both. Unfortunately, he's in a home now and the family is clearing out his old room and I'm getting the collection. I wanted to look into how I might be able to record copies of some of the old records for the family and as part of that process, came across a website from UCSB that has an archive available to the public of some of these old wax cylinder recordings. Here is the link if you're interested.

 

[Akula]

Just because it would really fit here:

 

[Flint]

I think this is extremely cool. Archiving old media is an issue we've been struggling with for over 100 years, and it isn't getting better. In the digital age this problem is exponentially exaggerated because not only are the media formats dying off, but the file formats are too vast and those formats which failed to succeed are hard to impossible to find supporting software to read. Add to that the sheer volume of media being created in the modern era, and this becomes an issue archivists cannot deal with.

I have extremely mixed feeling about a solution, but it seems someone needs to get the massive funds necessary and figure it out. The Library of Congress cannot keep up, and I am not sure they should be relied on to handle everything anyway.

 

[TKoP]

BTW, haven't found a good system that isn't going to require a bit of engineering know how...