12,000 of which are unique titles. The goal of this digitization project is to provide 6,000 audio files by 2010."This is a really nicely done site--clean and easy to search and navigate, with abundant metadata. And you may download the songs as MP3s! They should have a podcast or two of songs from the collection.
There is no northwest content that I could find at the site but there are a lot of songs on historical topics. A keyword search for "war" brings up fascinating WW1 nuggets such as the instrumental Battle of the Marne the rousing Are we downhearted - no! and the touching My Bugler boy. And don't miss the Scottish Wit and Humor category--which reminds me of Robert Darnton's oft-quoted point that "When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it."
[Via Metafilter. For additional wax cylinder recordings online see The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at UCSB.]
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