UNESCO Memory of the World

ILKAR works with the collections of Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv to improve the preservation of cylinder recordings.

The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, today part of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, preserves some of the earliest sound documents of the world. They were collected with a phonograph on wax cylinders between 1893 and 1954.

Established by the psychologist Carl Stumpf in September 1900 and directed from 1905-1933 by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv attained worldwide renown not only due to the singularity and the value of the recordings, but also because of the exemplary use of recording and processing technologies.

For many decades the collection was inaccessible due the World War II and cold-war-related political predicaments. Only as late as 1991 the collections of the Berlin Phongramm-Archiv  were returned to the Ethnological Museum. 

In 1999, almost 100 years after the founding of the archive, the early wax cylinder collections received the honour of being entered in the UNESCO register "Memory of the World".

For more information on the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and its cylinder collections, see

• this Lars-Christian Koch, Albrecht Wiedmann, Susanne Ziegler; The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv: A treasury of sound recordings; Acoustical science and Technology, Vol. 25 (2004) , No. 4 pp.227-231.
• Ziegler, Susanne. Die Wachszylinder des Berliner Phonogramm-Archivs. Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin N.F. 73. Berlin.