What's the best way to catalog cylinders?

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marcapra
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What's the best way to catalog cylinders?

Post by marcapra »

My cylinder collection has grown so large that I think it's time to catalog them. I want to do it in the least time consuming way. I was thinking of just putting all of a type of cylinder together, such as Blue Amberols. Then sorting them by the thousands with all the 1000's going in one box, the 2000's in another box, and so on. Then writing down the catalog numbers on a notepad, or typing them into a computer pad using Excel, or other program, that could put the numbers in numerical order. Then I would know if I had a particular cylinder before buying a duplicate by mistake. What do you think?

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PeterF
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Re: What's the best way to catalog cylinders?

Post by PeterF »

I ended up just taking that spreadsheet of all the edison records, which gets linked here pretty frequently, and modifying it for the purpose. Add and subtract columns as needed. You can mark the ones you have, plus add tags for condition, acquisition date etc...and storage location in your home.

Best part of it is all the extra info that’s already in there, such as cross references between discs and the cylinders dubbed from them, recording dates, artist and songwriter info, etc.

My diamond discs are almost done, then on to the cylinders.

My eventual idea is to throw it onto a very old iPad that is hanging around unused, and leave it in the record area as an instant searchable index for the collection.

As for storage arrangement, I keep the discs in catalog number order. The cylinders are in zones, based upon type/category and then ordered by catalog number. Zones include:

- later, 1920s popular issues (>4700)
- classical (“blue box”) issues
- the Special Amberols
- political and other spoken word records (wax and blue)
- wax amberols
- other (earlier, <4700) blue amberols
- black wax records
- non-edison stuff
- brown wax

A zone can reside in a drawer in a machine, a drawer or two or more in a record cabinet, or a storage case. My black waxes are the least frequently played and are neatly socked away in cardboard boxes until I figure out something better.

vansteem78
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Re: What's the best way to catalog cylinders?

Post by vansteem78 »

Though I do some organizing of my cylinders as well as 78s I feel to much cataloging or organizing will turn my hobby into a job. I retired because I did not want to work. ha ha In my sheet music cabinets where most of my cylinders are kept except in drawers under my 75 and 1A I put like cylinders together thus one drawer under my 1a for two minute celluloid, one for two minute wax, one for four minute wax etc. etc. I do that in all the cabinets. That is enough organizing for me. I have four sheet music cabinets I use for cylinders and one newly made cabinet which I use for only blue amberols without boxes because it has pegs thus boxes cannot be used in there. Oh I forget I do have a cabinet with 'metal prongs' so only use that one under my VIII for blue amberols as I am afraid those prongs would break the wax ones.

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