What the Critics Are Saying

• 11/16/2005 "Treasure Trove" (The Anachronist blog)

  "The UCSB site is astonishing: an expertly designed, easily searchable trove of beautiful, weird, wonderful records, many of them extremely rare...I can't help but suspect that we're watching a turning of the scholarly tide; I think we'll see a lot more work on The Other Roots Music in the coming years."

• 11/16/2005 "Old cylinder recordings (1890-1920) archive now online..." (Discussion on I Love Music)

• 11/17/2005 "Digital Archive of Cylinder Recordings" (Ukulelia weblog)

• 11/17/2005 "5000 music cylinders digitized and posted" (Boingboing.net)

• 11/17/2005 "Wax Cylinder Collection" (CBC's "As It Happens")

• 11/18/2005 "University of California, Santa Barbara Digitizes Over 5,000 Cylinders" (Center for the Internet and Society Levine Blog)

• 11/18/2005 "5000 Cylinder Recordings Placed Online" (Slashdot discussion)

• 11/23/2005 "What Did Our Ancestors Listen To?" (Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter)

• 12/7/2005 Genealogy Today: Podcasts bring genealogy to your home computer or iPod (Clark County, Washington, Columbian)

• 12/14/2005 "Whistle a happy tune" (USA Today's Tech_Space blog)

• 12/21/2005 "Home Listening for the Holidays" (Seattle Weekly)

• 12/23/2005 "Edison Amberol" (Sycamore Review)

• Jan/Feb 2006 "Family Historians are accustomed to silent searching through history, but wouldn't it be nice if history actually said something to us?" (Ancestry Magazine)

• 1/5/2006 "The Year in Culture: Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Curtis Sittenfeld, and others on 2005's most notable cultural happenings" (Slate Magazine)

• 1/6/2006 "Party Like it's 1899" (Associated Press ASAP feature, also at Austin American-Statesman (Austin360.com), InsideNova.com, Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg Times, Waco Tribune-Herald, Houston Chronicle, Longview (TX) News-Journal, Greenville (NC) Daily Reflector, Grand Junction Daily Sentinal, Rocky Mount (NC) Telegram, Lufkin (TX) Daily News, Elizabeth City (NC) Daily Advance, Marshall (TX) News Messenger, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AccessAtlanta.com) et. al)

• 1/20/2006 "Library offers early recordings online" (UCSB Daily Nexus)

• 2/2/2006 "Preserving fragile cylinder recordings" (American Public Media's Future Tense)

• 2/12/2006 "UCSB puts historic recordings on Web" (Santa Barbara News Press)

• 2/13/2006 "Changing History" (Wall Street Journal)

  Historical material heading onto the Web isn't all documents and images, either. Last November, 5,000 digitized wax-cylinder recordings dating back to 1895 were posted online by the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Among the recordings: Tin Pan Alley music, vaudeville performances and advertisements from that time.

  Seldom Heard

  Rick Altman, a professor of cinema and comparative literature at the University of Iowa, says that the digitized cylinders have been a blessing for his research work. He recently downloaded routines by Russell Hunting, a comedian around the turn of the 20th century whose recordings, until now, were nearly inaccessible. Mr. Altman has written extensively about silent-movie-era performers who specialized in making sounds to match the action on the screen -- from chirping birds to foreign accents -- and says that many of these performers modeled their styles after Mr. Hunting's.

  "I had to write about this without ever having heard him," Mr. Altman says. "Now I'll have a better sense of what people were looking for."

• 2/13/2006 "Rare recordings available online" (Contra Costa Times)

• 2/13/2006 "Brief news items from around California" (San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, San Luis Obispo Tribune, Monterey County Herald)

• 2/14/2006 "Cylinder recordings from Edison's era find new life in podcasts" (Columbia News Service)

• 2/21/2006 Morning News program (KCLU, Thousand Oaks, CA)

• 3/16/2006 America's forgotten pop legacy, Soundcheck, WNYC (New York). Interview with Jody Rosen, Music Critic, Slate.com.

• 3/17/2006 "Listeners rediscover Tin Pan Alley pop" (International Herald Tribune)

• 3/19/2006 "How pop sounded before it popped" (New York Times)

• 3/20/2006 "Archaic sounds caress modern ears" (Wired News)

• 3/22/2006 "Web search: It's all in the archive" (Minneapolis StarTribune)

• 4/1/2006 "Sidetrack: April 2006" (WILL, Champaign-Urbana, IL)

• 4/2/2006 "Sunday Edition" (CBC Radio One)

• 4/4/2006 "Cooking the clocks" (Columbia Spectator)

• 4/13/2006 "Historians strive to save old sounds" (Christian Science Monitor)

• 5/13/2006 "Online treasures for early music fans" (Toronto Star)

• 5/16/2006 "Front Row" (BBC Radio 4)

• 5/22/2006 "History of recording waxes lyrical on-line" (Daily Telegraph/Telegraph.co.uk)

• June 2006 "Party Like It's 1899!" (The Word)

• July 18, 2006. "Vintage music available for download" (Wall Street Journal also [Columbia, SC] The State)

• September 1, 2006. Scout Report Selection (Internet Scout Project)

• April 13, 2007. "Unlocking Nation's Musical Memories: Pre-1972 Copyright Confusion Keeps Archives Out of Reach." (Los Angeles Daily Journal)

• November 15, 2007. 10 Crucial Music Websites (OC Weekly)

• June 16, 2008. "50 Best Websites of 2008" (TIME Magazine)

• September 10, 2008. "Wax in My Ears: An Online Journey" (Wall Street Journal)

For media inquiries, a press release is available online or contact David Seubert at 805-893-5444 for further information.

An initiative of the UC Santa Barbara Library • (805) 893-5444 • Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9010. Direct questions or comments about the project or this page to the project staff or visit the help pages.