Advocate for cylinders

In my previous post I talked about the history of wax cylinder records and why their historical value is worth preserving and I discussed the people who are interested in preserving them and why. In my Agent of Change I am aiming to continue to spread awareness of cylinder records and promote the preservation of them by continuing campaigning and promoting archives and agencies who preserve records, like the UCSB Cylinder Archive. I have also created an Instagram account that is going to post daily to raise further awareness for cylinders. The account will post daily and share a fun fact about cylinder records and share a daily cylinder recording from the UCSB archives, which will both promote awareness and bring even more attention to the efforts being made at UCSB. My further research and starting the cylinder account has shown me that people are interested in cylinders quite a bit, seeing as the account so far has 19 followers and the 2 posts I have done so far are getting likes and engagement. I am hopeful that people will continue to follow the account and some more efforts can be made in the future to continue spreading awareness. I also hope that I can make an effort to reach out to UCSB eventually and help to organize some sort of campaign to get museums to start preserving cylinders as they do other forms of art. My goal beyond just raising awareness is mainly to get people/organizations who have the funds and resources to preserve and digitize cylinders to consider starting collections similar to the UCSB archives. UCSB is the only archive for cylinders of it’s kind, so I hope museums in the future consider starting collections of cylinders. I have also found out that the Library of Congress has also made efforts to preserve cylinders, but I am unsure if these kinds of efforts are still being made today. The Federal Cylinder Project also has worked to preserve Native American cylinder projects as well, which is a great effort to preserve a culture that not many people have considered. I feel that so far my Agent of Change has gone well, but I think that I should’ve reached out to UCSB sooner than I planned to, because I didn’t expect the Instagram account to gain immediate attention, although I am glad that it has actually started to make progress so early on. I am happy overall with this project as a whole, since I have made a lot of progress with gaining followers for the account. I also feel happy that I’ve found a way to use one of my personal interests with music to create something to inspire change and help preserve an important part of history that many don’t care about. I also feel like with this project I am going to start my own personal efforts to preserve cylinders and start a collection. I hope that one day I can start an archive to store and transcribe home recordings of wax cylinders. I just need to continue to run the account and hopefully save my money to purchase more cylinders and technology to play them and preserve the audio.