Smithsonial Global Sound for Libraries provides educators, students, and interested listeners with a variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms. It includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.
Categories of recordings include: American Folk, Blues, Bluegrass, Old Time Country, American Indian, World, Jazz, Classical & Broadway, Spoken Word & Sounds, and Children’s.
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is a joint venture with Smithsonian Global Sound®, an international network of music audio archives and an educational resource that delivers the world’s diverse cultural expressions in an informative way via digital media.
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is a component of Music Online.
Smithsonial Global Sound for Libraries is made available through a grant from the Unidel Foundation.