The University of California at Santa Barbara library has undertaken an heroic digitization effort for its world-class archive of 19th and early 20th century wax cylinder recordings, and has placed over 10,000 songs online for anyone to download, stream and re-use.

There are 2,000 more cylinders to come, and you can adopt a cylinder for a tax-deductible $60, which covers the rehousing, cataloging and digitizing of the cylinder.

UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive [UCSB]

An Archive of 10,000 Cylinder Recordings Readied for the Spotify Era [Claire Voon/Hyperallergic]

(via Beyond the Beyond)