The trend of digitizing vast archives of material from the late 19th and early 20th century continued last month as a Philadelphia company made 25,000 78s available to the general public online for free as part of The Great 78 Project, a community initiative for the preservation, research, and discovery of 78rpm records.

From 1898 to the 1950s, an estimated 3 million sides (~3 minute recordings) were made on 78rpm discs. These 25,000 are the first batch of an approximate 400,000-piece virtual record collection to be made available by the Internet Archive. The collection covers everything from rural southern gospel to Italian opera to "hot" jazz. It also includes the more obscure and unusual non-music recordings of the time.

Many companies of the era cut 78s but there were no real industry standards at the time. Each company used a slightly different speed and groove size, making it difficult to guess how the music was meant to sound.

"The real thing that's different about this project is managing groove size," said George Blood, who has digitized recordings for the Library of Congress, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, told Newsworks. "There's no standard for the size of the groove."

Check out The Great 78 Project here.

The Great 78 Project is also calling on the worldwide community to participate in the project by digitizing and sharing your own collection of 78s or donating them to the archive.