Shellac can be made out of different things, and has been a common polish for wooden instruments for example, before we got chemical protections like nitrocellulose lacquer. For handmade instruments [shellac and french polishing](https://www.lmii.com/blog/2017/10/07/finishing-options-for-m...) is still often preferred due to being environment and human friendly (chemical lacks are often non-healthy for the human who works with them), relatively inexpensive (cook your oyster shell :)), and for being do-it-yourself solution which many luthiers prefer. Some people claims a guitar polished with shellac sounds better than one with a cellulose lack, but I am not sure if I agree that is a deciding factor for the sound, probably more of a psychological factor.

I have a collection of several dozen 78 rpm shellac records that I inherited from my father, who inherited them from his father. I have a turntable but it won't play 78s. Been wanting to check with my local university to see if they could digitize them and maybe take the originals as a donation.

I have also thought about looking for an old Victrola at an antique market and keeping them to play as a novelty, but it would really be just that.

If a local university doesn't take them, the IA will - they accept donations of physical materials and will digitize and index them: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

It's not a question of if it's physically possible. It's a question of what the customer is going to do. You can't play a 78 on your iPhone. You can play Spotify on your iPhone. So the customer is going to use Spotify.

Do you know what are current sales figures for 78s? If I release on 78 rpm, how much can I expect to sell?

probably not much, but here wouldn't the case be if you streamed content that was originally from RPM how many views would I get?