Library and Information Services, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Friday 31 October 2014

Creative Artists at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, here's a CPD Opportunity!


The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has acquired a trial of the lynda.com Campus resource - a vast online library of engaging video tutorials that can help anyone learn software, creative, and business skills.

RCS staff and students are urged to try out this excellent resource during this trial period which will run from 31st October to 14th November.

To learn about navigating the site, exploring helpful features, finding specific instruction, and more, you can view an introductory video and watch the ‘How to use lynda.com’ course.

IT trainer Julie Halstead explains that you will need to create a profile, to try this resource during the trial period:-

  • Visit http://iplogin.lynda.com while you are in the Conservatoire, and type in your Conservatoire email address, then click the ‘Create a profile’ button.

    You will then be asked to enter your details and create a password for your Lynda profile. Once you have done this you will be able to login to access it via lynda.com from outside the Conservatoire also.
If you have any questions, contact Julie Halstead at j.halstead@rcs.ac.uk

New Encyclopedia for String Instruments - The Brompton's Book of Violin and Bow Makers

The Whittaker Library was proud to accept the gift of a copy of John Dilworth's new book,The Brompton's Book of Violin and Bow Makers.  

You'll find the book on our reference shelves here at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  It's an astonishing 683 page alphabetical listing of violin and bow makers - a lifetime's work of recording details from individual instruments, and data from an extensive bibliography.  The author, with the background of 'forty years at the bench and in the auction viewing rooms', explains in his foreword that Henley's  now historic Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers (1973) has long been a source of fascination for him, and the present volume is to be regarded as an extension, an update and in some cases a correction of entries or an alternative viewpoint to commentary in that book.

Additional information can be sourced through an appendix of instrument makers, backing up the information in this new dictionary by taking the reader to books which deal with their subjects in greater depth, and this is followed by a 'Select Bibliography of Sources and Further Reading'.  More about the book can be read at this link, HERE.

And There's More!

http://www.amati.com/maker-archive.html



There is also a website with a huge biographical resource of violin and bow makers (14,000 and counting) - most of the information is based on The Brompton's Book of Violin and Bow Makers.  Visit the Amati.com Maker Archive HERE.




Thursday 30 October 2014

How Happy is Your Halloween?

Here in the Whittaker Library, we have some surprises planned for Halloween.  Even Twittaker, the library mascot, has something up his sleeve.
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All we need now is some spooky music, or perhaps a skeleton-rattling score.  That's easily arranged.  Take a look HERE.  (101 things to do with a library catalogue?)

Monday 27 October 2014

DID Bach's wife have a hand in the cello suites?

Can You Trust What the Papers Say?

Reported in the Daily Mail, a scholar's suggestion that Anna Magdalena Bach might have written the cello suites!  

Do you believe it?  Can you?  READ HERE, if you're curious!

If you're nervous about trusting what you read in a popular newspaper, a Conservatoire colleague suggests you may prefer to read it in the Telegraph, HERE.


The sceptical amongst us quite rightly ask whether something you read in a newspaper is trustworthy at all.  Can you trust something that has been reduced to an attention-grabbing headline?  Would you quote it in an essay?  (Probably not.)  When was the research done, and by whom?

On this occasion, you can relax a bit, because the original paper was delivered at an Australian university a couple of years ago:-

"Mrs Bach and the Cello Suites" - the paper Martin Jarvis delivered in 2012.