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 allows educators and students around the world to access full-length streams of the vast audio database through an array of subscription options.

As a nonprofit endeavor, Smithsonian Global Sound is above all a mission rather than a commercial product, offering broad accessibility to the "smaller voices" of people all over the world via digital downloads.  It aims to heighten communication among and about people and cultures, accomplished principally through the culturally potent, meaning-laden medium of music, accompanied by informative notes, images, videos, educational features, and lesson plans. The content it delivers is the window through which Smithsonian Global Sound users may discover and appreciate other people, other value systems, and other realms of human accomplishment. And, in an increasingly mobile and culturally scattered world, it provides a link for the culturally estranged and isolated to connect with their own heritage through a curated, distilled collection of recorded sound.