Image from UCSB Special Collections
The Special Collections at UC Santa Barbara have a great site up about their cylinder collections. Cylinder recordings, as the site informs, were the first commercial recordings, which have the potential to tell us a lot about popular culture in the turn of the 20th century. The site features streaming audio (listen to their "Cylinder Radio" stream!), a searchable database of their recordings, and some of the most comprehensive information I have seen about cylinder history and preservation.