About the Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection The Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection provides online access to digital audio files of cylinders in the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive. Belfer’s cylinder collection includes over 22,000 cylinders, 12,000 of which are unique titles. The digital recordings, provided in both MP3 and WAV file format, can be searched or browsed by genre/subject. The project was partially supported by a Delmas Foundation grant. The MP3 and WAV recordings in the Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection differ in that the MP3 recordings have recording “noise” cleaned up and are in a compressed file format. The WAV files are much larger in size and are not cleaned up, so you will hear the hisses, crackles and pops that are heard when the actual cylinder is played. Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection’s current size is over one thousand records, but will be growing as we continue to digitize and add more cylinders to the collection. The 6,000 recordings that we plan to have available by 2010 are recordings of cylinders not duplicated by digitization projects at other institutions. One such project is University of California-Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project which, with the support of an IMLS grant in 2002, has digitized approximately 8,000 of their cylinders. With the cooperation of USCB, Belfer has selected 6,000 of its cylinders that compliment, rather than duplicate, the cylinders already digitized at UCSB. Cylinder donations are welcomed and will be added to Belfer’s physical collection as well as the Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection. Monetary donations in support of the cylinder digitization project are also welcomed.