During his days in the Lawrence music scene of the mid-’90s, Brad Allen heard and saw some pretty interesting stuff.

“I love the stories behind music,” says Allen, whom readers of a certain age may remember from Vitreous Humor and The Regrets.

Now, as Lawrence Public Library director, Allen is helping to archive local bands past and present in a new library initiative called the Lawrence Music Project.

A screenshot of the the Lawrence Music Project home page.

The website, which launched in May after a year of development, allows anyone with a library card to instantly stream or download tracks (and in some cases, entire albums) of local artists from 2015 all the way back to the 1960s.

“Knowing the people I know in the music community around here, we thought it’d be a great opportunity to showcase the music that’s going on in Lawrence,” says Allen, who was inspired by a similar project at the Iowa City, Iowa, public library. “We wanted to provide some music that might be unfindable anywhere else — music that’s unique to the town that may have been lost to history.”

Working closely with Fally Afani, editor-in-chief of the local music website I Heart Local Music and a freelance writer for the Lawrence Journal-World, and library technology assistant Sean Wilson, Allen and his volunteers — with funding from Mass. Street Music — originally focused on current bands.

The “last big push” came from Ed Rose, who joined the library staff in January to manage its Sound + Vision recording studio. The audio engineer helped digitize analog copies of music from the 1960s and 1980s, Allen says.

There’s been a “really good buzz” building around the website lately, which Allen hopes will result in an expansion of the Lawrence Music Project.

“I really love the idea of people logging in here and seeing what kind of music was created over the last 50 years,” says Allen, whose bands are among those archived.

The goal, ultimately, is to include oral-history interviews (conducted in the library’s Sound + Vision studio, tentatively) with as many groups as possible. Staffers are also looking for photographs and videos to round out the repository.

As of now, library patrons have unlimited access to around 800 songs. Allen wants that number to grow, and he’s asking for the public’s help to make it happen.

“I really see it succeeding as more of a community project than a library project,” he says. “We wanted to just get this off the ground and see if we could get people excited about hearing music that’s truly local — past and present.”

Anyone interested in contributing to the Lawrence Music Project is asked to email musicproject@lawrencepubliclibrary.org.