Most of the female singers from South India during this period were ‘Devadasis’ attached to the local temple and most of the songs by them are the praises of the deity of the temple to which they belonged. Most of the male singers from South India were actors from the local drama troupes which enacted musical dramas. The Devadasi system and musical dramas no longer exist and since most of the singers of this period were by mostly unknown artists, these recordings were rarely reissued. The quality of these acoustic recordings is inferior to electrically recorded ones. So, when electrical recordings came, people lost interest in the old recordings and did not care for these old recordings. Therefore every record found now may be the only remaining copy and needs to be preserved. This project catalogued and digitised musical performances on rare 78rpm records from collections in southern India. The main source of the recordings was the Gramophone Museum and Records Archive, Plassanal, Kerala. The second major source was the collection of Dr. Suresh Chandvankar, Mumbai. All the other sources were considerably smaller.