Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of over 6,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online.

On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound. Click the search button to begin, or sample some of our favorite selections in the featured cylinder section or by listening to online streaming radio.

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

"Born Again in the U.S.A." is a different story. It's more coherent by a mile. It's longer, and its group songwriting blends better. Its beautifully constructed first song, "Hey Chicken," sung by Mr. Tweedy, sounds like a reborn 45-r.p.m. single, doing nicely on rock radio in 1976: it's a series of riffs, a stodgy tempo, two lead-guitar lines harmonizing a third apart, a tambourine, and Mr. Tweedy's sneering, raspy voice instructing an ex-friend to get over himself. (The video, uploaded on YouTube.com a month ago, is a minor masterpiece: it arranges battle sequences from "Power Rangers," the early-80's Japanese children's television series, with displays of color-coded superheroes flying through the air balletically, loosely in sync to the song's downbeats.)

Barely five minutes into the new Kenny Rogers album, the guy starts singing about swastikas.

Music Review

La Rochefoucauld said, "We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring." That is only the beginning.

Are We Having a Conversation Yet? An Art Form Evolves

Until a few days ago, a search of Amazon's catalog of books using the word "abortion" turned up pages with the question, "Did you mean adoption?" at the top.

Amazon Says Technology, Not Ideology, Skewed Results

More important, perhaps, is the feature that allows Expo users to choose to view only listings from people in their MSN Messenger contact list or personal e-mail groups.

Microsoft Takes on Craigslist in the Battle for Classified Ads

Why would musicians travel halfway across the country, or halfway across the world, to play a 40-minute set through a mediocre sound system for a few dozen people glancing at their cellphones?

Because, at the 20th annual South by Southwest Music event, there was a chance that among those people were the right ones.

South by Southwest - Review - Music

Though Mr. Seidenberg joined New York Telephone as a cable splicer and spent a decade in a series of engineering jobs, he started on the road to upper management when he joined AT&T's regulatory department in 1976.

The dozen or so years Mr. Seidenberg spent dealing with lawmakers in Washington, some analysts say, taught him to be cunning and flexible.

Consider the handling of the debate over whether the Bell companies should be allowed to charge Internet content providers for faster connections to their customers.

Mr. Whitacre of AT&T drew loud criticism in November when he told Business Week that "for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts!" The comments galvanized consumer advocates and Internet content providers and pushed a once-obscure issue into prominence.

Though Verizon wants similar freedom to adjust its services, Mr. Seidenberg has largely been quiet, letting his lawyers in Washington do most of the talking.

While AT&T Does Deals, Verizon Spends to Hone Its Networks

For the first time in a quarter-century, the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday a case involving the basic question of what type of discoveries and inventions can be patented.

Justices Reach Out to Consider Patent Case

That bubble burst, but Silicon Valley has come back. The Mercury News, however, has not.

In Boomtown, but Still Stuck on a Bubble

Above all else we are sensory beings, learning and developing through the five senses. And I feel a dimension is being lost.

The Touch, the Feel, of That Written Letter