1912 Psalter

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This hymnal: http://www.hymnary.org/hymnal/PS1912, appears to be the same as the United Presbyterian Church hymnal I found here http://books.google.com/books?id=Wm0Cl8tI8KgC&dq=the%20psalter%201912&lr&as_brr=1&pg=PA453#v=onepage&q&f=false.

I can't find any record of a CRC Psalter Hymnal from 1912 outside of this site. Do you know where that information came from?

If the pdf of the Google Books scanned copy can be broken up, could it then be put on this site? Google seems to have a policy against commercial use, but would that apply to this?

Thanks


Comments

I am pretty sure that what happened was that the CRC simply approved the 1912 Presbyterian Psalter for use as the CRC's English-language psalter/hymnal. I think (going on vague memory) that I read this in the prefatory matter to the CRC's 1987 Psalter Hymnal.

At Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net) we regularly "harvest" Google books for scans, which we then proofread and format, producing high-quality free electronic books for Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) and elsewhere.

I'll try to get this book started at DP.

I haven't been attempting to harvest scans qua scans from Google for Hymnary: but would welcome help identifying other important hymnological material that would benefit from the DP treatment.

Great!

I also noticed this split leaf Scottish Psalter. http://books.google.com/books?id=0BHh4FSJyqIC&dq=scottish%20psalter&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

If you're not familiar, the book has tunes on top and versified Psalms on the bottom, and the pages split in two, so you can pair any Psalm with any tune of the same meter. In this case there are suggestions for what tunes to use, and the first line of a Psalm with each tune. Since Google just turned each top page along with bottom page and scanned the whole thing, the challenge would be re-splitting it.

Hymnary would also need to decide how to index this. I would count each Psalm as a hymn and each tune as a hymn.

I'd think there might be some demand for an "interactive" online split-leaf though I think that's beyond the intended function of hymnary.org. I've seen several sites with metrical Psalms and midi files of tunes, but never the scores. Perhaps if hymnary made the scores available I or someone else could try it.

Thanks

Hymnary.org's NEH grant has paid for about 2000 Princeton Sem hymnals to be scanned and added to internet archive, as well as put online here. We've put a few other hymnals from internet archive online at hymnary.org as well. Internet archive doesn't have the "no commercial use please" request.

I'm not sure whether adding google-scanned hymnals to hymnary.org, as a nonprofit, would count as commercial use. I tend to think not, since the scans are not being sold.

It should also be noted that Google has no legal basis to make the "no commercial use" request--the scans of public domain books are in the public domain.

For the first 77 years of its existence, the CRC used the Dutch Psalmboek. In the mid 1910s, the CRC used the presbyterian hymnal, and continued to use this through the 1976 hymnal, with some changes.