SYRACUSE, New York (AP) -- A vast collection of 78 rpm records is being donated to Syracuse University by the estate of a prominent New York City record shop owner.


Customers go through bins of 78 rpm records at a collectibles show last year in Wayne, New Jersey.

The more than 200,000 records represented the entire inventory of "Records Revisited," a landmark Manhattan store owned by Morton Savada, who died in February of lung cancer at age 85.

The collection, valued at $1 million, weighs 50 tons and represents more than a half-century of American music history.

Included are recordings from 1895 to the 1950s, with big band, jazz, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian and Latin among the genres. The collection also contains spoken-word, comedy and broadcast recordings, and "V-disks," which were distributed as entertainment to the U.S. military during World War II.

"It's a treasure trove of that era," said Joe Lauro, founder of Historic Film Archive, whose holdings include more than 40,000 musical performance clips and which holds exclusive rights to such famous shows as "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert."

"In terms of individual records at high prices ... there's not a lot of that in there. The value is that it's the largest massing of recordings from one particular era," said Lauro, who was befriended by Savada as a teenager and visited his store often during their 35-year-long friendship.

Even though they don't yet know what gems await them in Savada's collection, university officials were ecstatic about the donation, which boosts the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive's collection of 78 rpm records to about 400,000 -- second in the United States only to the Library of Congress collection. His family also donated Savada's collection of catalogs, discographies and other materials.