Resource of the Month: International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance

International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance

Every month we profile one of our best e-resources.  This one is a full-text database covering theatre, drama and dance including journals such as Dance Magazine, Modern Dance, Modern Drama, TD+T (Theatre Design and Technology).  Click on the link above, to start exploring this really useful resource.

PARIS IN STRING-TIME

Ten years with the Double Bass - a List of Bass Study Books

A useful listing of double bass studies and other instructional repertoire can be found online at the Médiathèque in Paris.  The series is called "10 Ans avec", and there are other listings for wind band, viola, and children's opera, with a harp listing promised shortly.

There, you see?  Bibliography sounds a dull word, but it's a gateway to lots of exciting stuff!

Whittaker Shares Useful Links for Performers

You can tell what our priorities are here!  We keep a Diigo note of useful links that we encounter in our work, and it's no suprise that the Scottish Music Centre and Irish Traditional Music Archive come top of the list this time.

Bibliographies are always a hot topic here, too. If you're a researcher, you'll already know how important it is to keep track of your resources.  Warwick University Library runs a Library Research Exchange, where we found this great page about annotated bibliographies, which we simply had to share with you.  (In a nutshell - a bibliography is essential.  Annotations bring untold added value - it's for your own benefit.)

Another research link that may be useful is the Biennial Music in Nineteenth Century Britain Conference.  It was in Cardiff this year, but watch this space for details of the 2015 Conference!

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Staff and Students Trial Oxford Bibliographies

Here’s an exciting free trial for an online music resource, for staff and students of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.   It’s available until 29^th June via internal access.

A member of our teaching staff asked about this, and it looks potentially very useful. (Oxford is the publisher that already gives us Grove Music online – an invaluable resource.)   The Whittaker Library is looking forward to getting feedback from members of the RCS community.  Details of the Trial :-

"Welcome to Oxford Bibliographies –  free trial access to the Music module is available to Royal Conservatoire staff and students until 29th June 2013

Your trial provides access to exclusive, authoritative research guides developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

Site Access Information:

To begin using Oxford Bibliographies, visit http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com. Users accessing the site via registered IP addresses will be automatically authenticated. Once you are authenticated, you can begin to access your trial immediately. 

Get the most out of your trial by exploring available and forthcoming subjects, taking a quick guided tour, or visiting our Help section for quick answers to many common questions you might have."  

Music manuscripts from Ireland (pre-20th century) - RISM listing

Kilcormack Missal,Trinity College Dublin

'Whittaker' gladly shares with you this excellent news of improved bibliographic access to Irish music manuscripts.  Here's the communication from Dr Catherine Ferris:-

"First Phase of the RISM Ireland Database Launched

http://www.rism-ie.org

RISM Ireland is delighted to announce the launch of a new Irish-focused free-to-access database of pre-twentieth century musical materials held in repositories throughout the island of Ireland. This new resource highlights the contents of Ireland’s collections in a national context. In addition, records from the RISM Ireland catalogue are shared with the RISM Zentralredaktion in Frankfurt, which publishes the collective work of RISM groups in thirty-five countries throughout the world, thereby placing the Irish sources in a worldwide context.

The work of RISM Ireland is project-based, focusing on diverse areas of Irish musical life and individual institutional holdings. This launch highlights the first major research project to be published in the database: The Mercer’s Hospital Music Collection. This project, undertaken in collaboration with RISM Ireland and RISM UK, resulted from a DIT Conservatory of Music & Drama research scholarship. The scholarship to carry out doctoral research on the collection was awarded to Tríona O’Hanlon and supervised by Dr Kerry Houston.

For further information, see the IAML (UK & Irl) February 2013 Newsletter or contact Dr Catherine Ferris."

Dissertation Time!

If you're a music undergraduate scoping your dissertation, this might be the biggest project you've yet had to manage.

Here are some useful websites to use while you're doing your literature search.  Your subject librarian team are ready and waiting to help you get started!

Writing a research proposal: the literature survey

Whether you call it a literature survey or a literature review ...

If you're writing a proposal for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree research project, these comments might help. 

(However, this is NOT about writing dozens of pages, describing scientific methods or submitting costings for a funding bid!)

So ... you've got an idea for a research project, and you've got to submit something in writing. 

• Have you established how much you are expected to write? 
• Do you have any indication how many citations you should come up with? 
• Have you been given any guidance about the currency of your citations?

The Whittaker Library supports staff and students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in their general studies and subject-specific research.  Our focus is the performing arts: music, drama, production, film, and dance.  If you were putting together a literature review for a scientific research project, you'd probably be much more concerned about currency.  (No point in outlining what you think is a cutting-edge piece of research, if the edge was metaphorically cut months or even years ago!)  That's not quite so crucial in our field.

The purpose of your literature review is to show that you know what's out there already.  The format of what you find (book, journal article, website etc) is not so important as the content.  Nonetheless, you'll make yourself look more convincing as a researcher if you show that you know about the most useful electronic resources.

The Whittaker Library offers a lot of subject-specific and more generic electronic resources.  What you need to do is three-fold:-

1. See what's in the Library catalogue - are there any key resources that you might use as a starting point?  (Or, indeed, that you think are so far off the mark that you wish to argue with?!)
2. Anyone can do a Copac library search, which will check all the UK national and university libraries at once. Zetoc is a good general resource, too.
3. See what a search of electronic resources comes up with.  Our library website has a page for ALL electronic resources (e-journals included); and another page for databases alone. 

If your research is going to be inter-disciplinary (eg combining music and drama), then the general searches are very important: you never know where your most likely sources will come from.  But don't forget to look at subject-specific bibliographic resources, too.  There are electronic abstracts and indexes especially for music, and especially for drama and dance.

How much time to spend?  Some people spend weeks, dipping in and out of resources before deciding what to include.  If you've got a limited amount of time, say a couple of hours, why not allocate half an hour to each of these three activities, then spend the last half-hour synthesising your findings and writing about what you've found?

Writing about what you've found is one thing; it's a good idea to put these resources in a neat, succinct bibliography, too.  That shows you understand the discipline of precise, accurate citation.  E.g.,

Atkinson, Charles M., The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Mediaeval Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Steyn, Carol, 'The Music Manuscripts of the Grey Collection in Cape Town and their European Connections', Fontes Vol.59 no.1 (2012), 45-56

Note that the first is a book; the second a journal article.  Bibliographies are in alphabetical order of author, but you describe books and journals slightly differently.

As soon as you start your research, you need to think much more deeply about bibliographies and ways of keeping track of your references.  But that's further down the line.

Good luck!

Where does it hurt? Performing Arts Medicine

A free online resource, drawn to our attention by Bibliolore -

Bibliography of Performing Arts Medicine

'Dedicated to the health of performing artists'

Many of Whittaker's followers are practising musicians, actors and dancers, and our books on injuries are often consulted!  This free online bibliography could be invaluable for practitioners and their teachers.

Virtuously Virtual. Diligently Digital

DIGITAL STUFF

The Whittaker Library is stuffed with good things, but don't forget that we have a lot of digital resources too.

Essay or project coming up? The task could be a whole lot easier if you use some of our specialised databases.  Here are just three.  The first two help you find what's out there, by giving you an abstract or brief summary and full bibliographic details of the articles etc.  And JSTOR not only tells you what's available on the database - it gives you full text, too.

• International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance (click here) e.g., you could search on Ballets Russes
• RILM music abstracts (click here)
• JSTOR (click here) - digitised, searchable back copies of music journals

2 things to remember:-

1. Shibboleth - the institutional login for using these resources outside the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's premises.  (Your login confirms you're a student or staff member here.)
2. We have lots more digital resources available via our Library A-Z of electronic resources page.

Your subject librarians are happy to assist you with electronic resources, if you need further help.