The musty smell of antiquity fills the air as music professor Ed Steele positions an old leather-bound book on an odd-looking scanner.With the press of a button the scanner comes to life, a light passes over the page, and before long a scanned page appears on Steele's computer screen.
Steele, a faculty member at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary's Leavell College, spent much of his recent sabbatical scanning and digitizing page after page from rare hymnals. To date, he has scanned and digitized nearly 30 of the seminary's 400-plus rare hymnals and a few hymnbooks from private collections.
The digitized hymns are available in Adobe PDF format free of charge at the seminary's online home for the new Center for Hymnological Research: http://www.nobts.edu/library/hymnological-research. ...
