While attending the ATLA conference last week, Claudette found out about a wonderful project undertaken by two groups at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and The Hymn Society here in Boston.
Hymnary.org is a repository containing over 5,000 digitized and indexed hymnals from denominations around the world. Their database contains almost 200,000 unique hymns and hymn tunes searchable by title, melody, meter, key, scripture reference, and more. They also provide related reference materials, a tool to compare the texts of different versions of the same hymn, and the ability to transpose hymns into different keys.
Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People" project, they are currently in the process of adding 500,000 more pages of scanned hymnals from the Louis F. Benson collection at the Princeton Theological Seminary library.
We are very excited to share this resource with our patrons. Hymnology has been an important part of the Congregational tradition, and we know that it will be very useful to some of you. Whether you're looking for the right hymn for this week's service or researching the role of religious music in American history, there is something just waiting to be found on this site.
We have also added a link to the Repositories section of our Useful Links page.
--Robin
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