To preserve or discover interesting 78rpm records you can download them to your own machine (rather than using our collection pages).  You can download lots on to a mac/linux machine by using a command line utility.

Preparation:  Download the IA command line tool.     Like so:

$ curl -LO https://archive.org/download/ia-pex/ia
$ chmod +x ia
$ ./ia help

Option 1:   if you want just a set of mp3’s to play download to your /tmp directory:

./ia download --search "collection:georgeblood" --no-directories --destdir /tmp -g "[!_][!7][!8]*.mp3"

or just blues (or hillbilly or other searches):

./ia download --search "collection:georgeblood AND blues" --no-directories --destdir /tmp -g "[!_][!7][!8]*.mp3"

Option 2: if you want to preserve the FLAC and MP3 and metadata files for the best version of the 78rpm record we have.  (if you are using a Mac Install homebrew on a mac, then type “brew install parallel”.  On linux try “apt-get install parallel”)

./ia search 'collection:georgeblood' --sort=publicdate\ asc --itemlist > itemlist.txt
cat itemlist.txt | parallel --joblog download.log './ia download {} --destdir /tmp -g "[!_][!7][!8]*"'

parallel --retry-failed --joblog download.log './ia download {} --destdir /tmp -g "[!_][!7][!8]*"'