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Music afficianados, particularly of early jazz and blues, as well as history buffs need to check out this site now! A description from the Slate article that led me there:
Definitely one of the coolest things I've seen on the the web in a while! 
This past Nov. 16, the University of California-Santa Barbara's Donald C. Davidson Library posted an astonishing trove of early sound recordings to the Internet. The Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project Web site features more than 5,000 wax cylinders, the first commercially available records ever produced, converted to downloadable MP3s and streaming audio files. There are classical, operatic, and solo instrumental pieces; yodels; poems; comic monologues; band music; even Teddy Roosevelt delivering a populist stump speech and Ernest Shackleton discussing a brush with death in Antarctica in a weirdly hypnotizing monotone. Above all, there are the pop tunes churned out by Tin Pan Alley's song factories at the turn of the century: rags, sentimental ballads, novelty songs, and a dizzying range of dialect numbers written for vaudeville's blackface comedians and other "ethnic impersonators."
As slices of cultural history, the songs are rich, offering glimpses of a nation shaking off its Victorian inhibitions, one quaintly "racy" lyric and syncopated tune at a time. They are also a reminder that the standard pop music historical narrative is badly in need of revision. When critics discuss the antecedents of rock and soul and hip-hop, they invariably invoke The Folk—the Appalachian balladeer, the Delta bluesman, the cowpoke in the prairie with his banjo. But today's hit-makers are equally indebted to the tunesmiths and vaudevillians who stalked Tin Pan Alley in 1900; Progressive Era pop is the other roots music. Spend just a few minutes browsing the UCSB site and you will stumble on forgotten heroes of American song and discover a body of recordings easily as rich, exciting, and exotic as that much-mythologized rock snob icon The Anthology of American Folk Music. The records hold up, and not just as curios. Listen to Billy Murray's recording of Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and you will hear, through nearly a century's worth of hiss and crackle, an irresistible tune and a singer swinging it stylishly. It was a huge hit in 1911, and it still sounds like one.
As slices of cultural history, the songs are rich, offering glimpses of a nation shaking off its Victorian inhibitions, one quaintly "racy" lyric and syncopated tune at a time. They are also a reminder that the standard pop music historical narrative is badly in need of revision. When critics discuss the antecedents of rock and soul and hip-hop, they invariably invoke The Folk—the Appalachian balladeer, the Delta bluesman, the cowpoke in the prairie with his banjo. But today's hit-makers are equally indebted to the tunesmiths and vaudevillians who stalked Tin Pan Alley in 1900; Progressive Era pop is the other roots music. Spend just a few minutes browsing the UCSB site and you will stumble on forgotten heroes of American song and discover a body of recordings easily as rich, exciting, and exotic as that much-mythologized rock snob icon The Anthology of American Folk Music. The records hold up, and not just as curios. Listen to Billy Murray's recording of Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and you will hear, through nearly a century's worth of hiss and crackle, an irresistible tune and a singer swinging it stylishly. It was a huge hit in 1911, and it still sounds like one.
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