Libraries, Digital Collections, Real Musical Instruments, REALLY Happy Singers

In the past couple of weeks, we've come across several interesting news alerts, that might interest our readers.  Here are three of them!

The Horniman Library and Museum

The Horniman Library is, not surprisingly, linked with the Horniman Museum - which contains a collection of historical musical instruments.  They are in London.  The Horniman's Library is now available on Copac, and that means more places to find books if we don't have them in our own collections!
 
If you're a musician, you might like to know more about the musical instrument collection too, so let's share the 'blurb' that we received in our email:-

"The Horniman Library collection contains books from the 16th century through to the present day, and covers a wide spectrum of subject areas related to the remit of the Horniman Museum, with a focus on natural history, anthropology and musical instruments. The collection, which originated with Frederick Horniman’s own book collection, has been added to by subsequent directors, curators and librarians and now amounts to some 30,000 volumes. The development of the library collections has been closely linked to object acquisition and curatorial practice in the museum and there is thus a strong connection between the book and object collections.

"You can read more on the Copac blog here: http://blog.copac.jisc.ac.uk/2017/04/19/horniman-library-catalogue-loaded/.

 

"Or, to browse the Horniman Library’s records, select the Main Search tab at http://copac.jisc.ac.uk and choose ‘Horniman Library’ from the list of libraries." 

RNCM Archives shared the next news item with us:-

New project brings major folk song collection to UK 

There's an article in the online M-Magazine which tells you more about the news.  Here's a taster:-

"The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Digital Archive has launched a new project to incorporate a pivotal early 20th century collection of British songs into its folk music database.The digitised collection of James Madison Carpenter (pictured above), which has previously only been accessible by visiting the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, will become free to access online for the first time ..." Read the whole article here

The Neuroscience of Singing 

Okay, every so often, more research appears which proves what everyone here knows to be true - singing is good for you!  But this research is particularly authoritative, so we'd like to share it with anyone who sings or teaches or conducts singers!  It's by Cassandra Sheppard and was published on a website called Uplift Connect on Sunday 11th December 2016.  
Singing Together Brings Heartbeats Into Harmony