Philly.com - 'The Great 78 Project' is giving history digital life, in Chestnut Hill

We live in a Utopian listening era in which music streaming services offer more than 30 million songs, and everything ever recorded can be accessed with the click of a touchscreen.

Well, maybe not everything.

For instance, until audio engineer Liz Rosenberg took a fragile 78 rpm shellac disc of the University of Pennsylvania’s Mask and Wig Club’s “We’ll Paddle Our Canoe” released in 1927 into her nitrile-gloved hands and placed it on a crazy-looking four-armed turntable at George Blood Audio in Chestnut Hill on a recent afternoon, a digital version of the performance did not exist.

But now it does.