About
Shira — Hebrew for “song” — is a digital gateway to the Jewish music collections held at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. It brings together recordings, performers, compositions, and record labels from several Penn collections into a single, searchable catalog.
Shira spans more than 6,300 albums and over 11,000 individual recordings, drawn from Penn's holdings of Jewish music in Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino, and other languages — from cantorial and liturgical music to klezmer, Yiddish theater and folk song, Sephardic traditions, and Israeli popular music. Every album, artist, composition, and label has its own page, cross-linked so you can move from a recording to its performers, to the other albums they appear on, and to the labels that released them.
The catalog is powered by a community Wikibase knowledge base, the same software family that underlies Wikidata. Each record is structured, linked data that can be queried, reused, and connected to identifiers in Discogs, MusicBrainz, and partner sound archives. Every page on this site links back to its underlying data so the information stays open and verifiable.
Shira is produced by Judaica Digital Humanities at the Penn Libraries. [PLACEHOLDER: one or two sentences on the team, funding, and project goals.]