Report: “A Temple of Sound Awaits in the UCSB’s Collection of Early Music and Sound Recordings”
Located in a wing of the UC Santa Barbara Library, about a quarter mile from the Pacific Ocean, the university’s collection of early music is the most extensive on the West Coast. Descend in an elevator a few stories underground with David Seubert, curator for the Performing Arts Collection at UC Santa Barbara Library, into the Cylinder Audio Archive, a windowless, climate-controlled storage facility purpose-built to hold wax cylinders and 78-rpm records and, after adjusting to the 10-degree temperature drop, a temple of sound awaits.
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Under Seubert’s guidance, 10,000 of these cylinders have been digitized and made available for streaming and download — for free — at the archive’s online portal: there are string quartets, spirituals, musical theater and humorous recitations; Mexican corridos from 120 years ago; whistling songs, yodels, zarzuelas and minstrel music; polkas, sermons, waltzes, marches and rags.
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Direct to Cylinder Audio Archive
Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, News

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.