The Ohio State Lima Outstanding Scholar Award recognizes a campus faculty member for scholarship representing a significant contribution in the scholar’s discipline.
The 2025 winner of the Outstanding Scholar Award is Tina Schneider, director of the Lima Campus Library and professor in the University Libraries.
With separate degrees in music, music history, and library science, Tina Schneider has applied her expertise to the field of hymnology, the study of what people sing together during religious services.
Much of her work in recent years has been with hymnary.org, the world’s largest database in the field. Schneider has served as the Research Director of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada. She has also served as the general editor of The Dictionary of North American Hymnology, or DNAH. In these capacities, she helped integrate the DNAH into hymnary.org by advising on the creation of editorial guidelines and cataloging rules. The impact of that work speaks for itself. Hymnary.org now indexes nearly 7,000 hymnals in dozens of languages. It attracts more than 10 million users from over two hundred countries.
In addition, since 2009, Schneider has contributed to the content of 163 collections by editing, adding, and supplementing thousands of records. These hymnals have ranged from Baptist to Jewish.
Schneider’s work has also resulted in peer-reviewed publications. She co-authored two articles on the design and use of hymanry.org. She has co-authored yet another article with a student conducting original research as part of a University Library Research Fellowship. Over the past five or six years, Schneider has concentrated on Spanish-language publications. That work has resulted in a 64% rise among Spanish-speaking users of hymnary.org as well as a published article by Schneider that showed how to use data to reveal underrepresented figures in the field of hymnology.
Eminent scholars at prominent institutions have testified with superlatives to the importance, helpfulness, and excellence of Schneider’s scholarly work. One pointed out how helpful to his own research Schneider’s has been because of its historical scope, including its giving visibility to women’s contributions. Another emphasized that Schneider’s scholarly excellence in the field of hymnology has not only served to inform, but also both encouraged others to follow her methods and intrigued them through her suggestions for further work to be done. The academic community at the Lima campus is truly grateful to have such an Outstanding Faculty Scholar as Tina Schneider serving as director of the campus library.