Sounding Spirit Digital Library

The University of Kentucky Libraries is partnering with Emory University and other institutions on an NEH Humanities Collections and References Resources Implementation grant to develop the Sounding Spirit digital library. This virtual humanities collection will provide a single point of access to approximately 750 significant books of vernacular sacred music from the southern United States published between 1850 and 1925 and support rich engagement with these seminal, yet under-collected works. This corpus of gospel songbooks, spirituals collections, shape-note tunebooks, and hymnals offers rich insights into the lived social and religious experience of Americans who used these songbooks to navigate the turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical landscape and a modernizing nation state. The UK Libraries will contribute by providing preservation quality digital scans of approximately 250 selected books from our holdings. The digital scans will be added to the Sounding Spirit digital library maintained by Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship.