Lima Campus Archives & Special Collections: Home
Contact the Library
Tina Schneider
Professor/Library Director
567-242-7214
schneider.290@osu.edu
Zach Walton
Reference & Instruction Librarian
567-242-7235
walton.485@osu.edu
Call or e-mail the library
lima-library@osu.edu
567-242-7330
OSU @ Lima Campus Library
There are many more resources available to help you excel on your research projects, and you can reach them from the Lima Campus Library website.
DNAH Hymnal Collection
The Lima Campus Library is the home of the Dictionary of North American Hymnology (DNAH) hymnal collection.
The 1000-volume collection in Lima represents the broad range of congregational song indexed in Hymnary.org. Dating from 1815 to the present, the collection consists at least 20 languages, including Chinese, Croatian, Dakota, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Igbo, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yoruba; three faiths (Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist); and at least three styles of musical notation. Anyone may use this collection by making an appointment with the Library Director.
There are many other hymnal collections to explore as well. Please go to Hymnal Collections of North America for more information.
A complete list of the DNAH Collection can be found here:
Or, you can search for hymnals here:
The Dictionary of North American Hymnology (DNAH) is a decades-old project of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada that has as its goal the indexing of all hymnals printed in North America to 1978. With its 5,000 hymnals and over 1 million hymn instances, the DNAH is now housed at Hymnary.org. The term "hymn" is used broadly, as a way to describe pieces of congregational song; the DNAH is not tied to any denomination or religion in its coverage. Through an NEH grant, Hymnary.org has digitized over 2,000 public domain hymnals, and in addition to the DNAH data also offers sound recordings, scores, arrangements, page scans, and more.
The DNAH began under the guidance of Henry Wilder Foote with the vision of being the American equivalent of John D. Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology. In 1952, the editorship fell to Leonard Ellinwood, head of the humanities section at the Library of Congress, and his assistant Elizabeth Lockwood. Upon Ellinwood's retirement, the DNAH database moved to Oberlin college in 1984 under the care of Mary Louise Van Dyke. Under the guidance of Paul Powell, the DNAH data was keyed in and published on CD-ROM in 2003. The CD-ROM was then converted to a relational format by Bill Clemmons with funding from Point Loma Nazarene University and the Wesleyan Center for 21st Century Studies. The DNAH data was added to Hymnary.org on July 8, 2009.
The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, founded in 1922, has as its mission to encourage, promote, and enliven congregational song. Visit its website for more information about its workshops, events, classes, peer-reviewed journal, and more!