The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center Alan Lomax/Association for Cultural Equity The collection of the folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax is being digitized for dissemination. Above, a photo he took at a church in Portsmouth, Va., in 1960. The folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was a prodigious collector of traditional music from all over the world and a tireless missionary for that cause. Long before the Internet existed, he envisioned a "global jukebox" to disseminate and analyze the material he had gathered during decades of fieldwork. A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax's imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive - some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners - is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads. On Tuesday, to commemorate what would have been Lomax's 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label is releasing "The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center," a digital download sampler of 16 field recordings from different locales and stages of Lomax's career. "As an archivist you kind of think like Johnny Appleseed," said Don Fleming, a musician and record producer who is executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity and involved in the project. "You ask yourself, "How do I get digital copies of this everywhere?" " Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the South, Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond. Lomax worked both in academic and popular circles, and increased awareness of traditional music by doing radio and television programs, organizing concerts and festivals, and writing books, articles and essays prodigiously. At a time when there was a strict divide between high and low in American culture, and Afro-American and hillbilly music were especially scorned, Lomax argued that such vernacular styles were America's greatest contribution to music. "It would be difficult to overstate the importance of what Alan Lomax did over the course of his extraordinary career," said the writer Tom Piazza, who has written an introductory essay for "The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax," a book of about 200 of Lomax's photographs that is to be published in the fall. He was an epic figure in and of himself, with a musical appetite that was omnivorous and really awe inspiring, who used the new recording technology to go and document musical expression at its most local and least commercial. Lomax, a Texan by birth, devoted the last two decades of his life to the Global Jukebox project. Looking for commonalities among musical styles from all over the world, he early on began using personal computers to help develop criteria to identify and classify such similarities, in the process creating something very much like the algorithms used today by Pandora and other music streaming services. "Alan was doubly utopian, in that he was imagining something like the Internet based on the fact he had all this data and a set of parameters he thought of as predictive," said John Szwed, a Columbia University music professor and the author of "Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World," a biography published in 2010. But he was also saying that the whole world can have all this data too, and it can be done in such a way that you can take it home. That is one goal of the Association for Cultural Equity, which oversees Global Jukebox and other Lomax-related initiatives from modest offices at Hunter College in Manhattan, with a budget that was $250,000 last year. The music Lomax collected has been available in 45-second snippets on the Cultural Equity Web site for several years but is now being digitized in its entirety for streaming, a process scheduled to conclude next month; a similar process is under way for his radio shows, lectures and interviews. Some music is also being sold in formats ranging from iTunes and CDs to vinyl LPs. A small proportion of the Lomax material has been made available on commercial labels like Rounder and Atlantic. "This project has evolved as the technology has evolved," said Lomax's daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, who is president of the Association for Cultural Equity.