Preservation of kobzar music

The idea of the preservation of kobzar music by means of sound recording originated in 1901–02.

The 12th Archeological Congress was held in Kharkiv, now in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire.

During its preparation, the committee discussed a letter from Russian ethnographer Vsevolod Miller with the suggestion to using recently invented graphophone (Alexander Bell's version of phonograph, which used wax-coated cylinders).

In 2013, a member of the Wikimedia Ukraine team Yuri Bulka and folklorist Irina Dovgalyuk (who did research on Kolessa's collection[6]) used a Wikimedia grant to digitize 56 cylinders and make the records available under the Creative Commons license.

They were re-issued in 1969 as a book Мелодії українських народних дум (Tunes of the Ukrainian Folk Dumas), now available in "crowd-digitized" form.