The Internet Archive is becoming a home to the world's largest collection of digitized vinyl recordings, with The Great 78 Project working to preserve, research and discover 78rpm records.
New York’s ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) has been preserving audiovisual materials since 1985, and after partnering with the Internet Archive, it brought the project to the public.
Along with audiovisual digitization vendor George Blood L.P. and additional volunteers, the project has put more than 50,000 digitized 78rpm discs and cylinder recordings on the Internet Archive, which can be listened by anyone on the web.
The project researchers said that there were approximately 3 three million "sides" made on 78rpm discs from about 1898 to the 1950s. The ones that were a "hit" - they made it to LP or CD as well.
Most 78s weren't "vinyl" at all, but actually made from shellac (a type of beetle resin). They are incredibly brittle that even picking them up can make them break apart. As a result the recordings can be lost forever.
This project aims to bring the lesser-known recordings to the modern era, in a format that allows researchers to manipulate and study the recordings without causing any damage to the original pieces.
The collection offers expansive selections in early blues, bluegrass, yodeling and others.
The project doesn't want to "improve" on the recordings with remastering. Its aim is to preserve them exactly as they sound as a "historical artifact."
But digitizing these old records is a complicated process. Different types of styluses can affect how a record sounds when played, and playback speeds weren't standardized until around the late 1920s, What this mean, there is a debate about the correct speed at which a record should be played.
Preservationists working on the project also have to take into account aesthetic decisions like microphone placement and what frequencies the record's material is able to replicate.
With the Great 78 Project's collaboration, the Internet Archive also has over 200,000 donated physical recordings.
Users can browse the collection by year, creator, genre and language. When listening to a recording, there are often alternate takes, or multiple versions of the same song that have been recorded with different styluses. They're all available to leave comments on and download.