University of Kentucky: Sounding Spirit Team, Including UK Libraries and Niles Center, Awarded NEH Grant for American Music Digital Library

The Sounding Spirit Digital Library team, which includes the University of Kentucky Libraries and the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music, as well as archival partners from five other institutions across the United States, has been awarded a third grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to further preserve and enhance engagement with historic Southern sacred songbooks.

This $344,687 grant from the NEH’s Humanities Collections and References Resources (HCRR) program will build on a successful one-year HCRR-funded planning project, which debuted a pilot digital library in 2020 comprised of 22 books from four partner institutions.

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Along with making sacred American music accessible to the public, the NEH grant will support the research and writing of 425 volume summaries, 100 collection descriptions and 15 bibliographic essays introducing readers to the many works and contributions of their authors.

The digital library will accompany Sounding Spirit’s five facsimile editions of sacred Southern vernacular songbooks made possible by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant awarded in 2018.

Sounding Spirit’s collaborative partners whose historical holdings complement the collection include:

• Emory’s University’s Pitts Theology Library and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library;
• Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University;
• Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives and Special Collections;
• Special Collections Research Center and William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; and
• Department of Special Collections and University Archives and Helmerich Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum at the University of Tulsa.

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Directl Sounding Spirit Digital Library