NEH to Fund Digitization of Sacred Music Collection at Niles Center

University of Kentucky's John Jacob Niles Center for American Music is home to one of four archives of sacred music that will benefit from the Sounding Spirit initiative's second grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support pioneering work in digital scholarly editions.  

The $58,230 grant from the NEH’s Humanities Collections and References Resources program will support a one-year planning process that will include the pilot launch of a digital library that will eventually make hundreds of volumes of spirituals, gospel music, shape-note hymnody and words-only hymnals accessible to the public. The digital library will accompany Sounding Spirit’s annotated facsimile editions of five currently inaccessible books of sacred southern vernacular music made possible by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) project received in the fall of 2018.