Around 2011 Lance and April Ledbetter asked Michael Graves to join the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation as the technical advisor. The goal was to digitize rare 78 rpm record collections built by collectors who devoted their lives to finding them. They put together a turnkey remote digitization setup and trained people within the community to do the work so that the collections could be digitized without leaving their homes. Collectors who opened their doors to the foundation included, Roger Misiewicz, Frank Mare, Nathan Salsburg and Joe Bussard, whose obsession built one of the most culturally important private archives in the United States. To date more than 50,000 recordings have been preserved.
Now, we’re happy to report that the Dust-to-Digital Foundation and the University of California, Santa Barbara have partnered to make thousands of those historic recordings freely accessible to the public through the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR)