Referencing Just Got Easier!

RefME - Have You Discovered It Yet?

We all have our favourite apps when it comes to regularly-performed tasks like referencing.  Karen swears by Mendeley.  Others use Zotero - both are freeware.  (Some institutions offer institutional  access to EndNote, which saves you money.)  Diigo is great freeware for saving hyperlinks to the cloud.

So why try another?  Well, we read a review of RefME in the Times Higher Education magazine, and it looks impressively simple.  Most of us just want to keep a list of what we've read, and a way of pulling it into whatever we're writing, whether for footnotes, endnotes or a bibliography.

That's what RefME does.  Find your book via the search box, and save it.  Exporting couldn't be simpler - it provides a box of text for you to copy and paste into your paper, in a wide range of formats.

•  RefME
• THE review of RefME by Chris Havergal

Because You Need Instant Access to Your Favourite Websites

Diigo

Karen has just been telling a colleague about Diigo, and we thought it might interest you too. Basically, it is a way of saving all your favourite weblinks "to the cloud", so that you can access them via any device anywhere. You can add keywords and save to different folders in your account, to help you retrieve the links later.

• This is Karen's Diigo account, built up over several years: Click HERE.
• And this is the Diigo homepage if you want to start your own account. Personally, we think it's brilliant. 

We are the Whittaker Library, helping our performing artists and technicians access and organise the information they need for their teaching and learning. 

The Music Librarian's Favourites

FAVOURITES?  Did you hear us say that the supposedly impartial music librarian has favourites? 

Relax!  These are favourite websites, not favourite borrowers, because of course we love you all equally.

Karen saves her favourite websites to Diigo, so she can share them with you later.  However, when there's a lot of cataloguing and not as much time, it seems more sensible to share them all at once.  So as a special treat, you're being granted a peek into the music librarian's recently favourited finds.

Click here for a whole batch of useful links on:-

• The E T Bryant Memorial Prize for early career music librarians
• An extinct stringed instrument - a mini cello played under your chin!
• The British Library Mechanical Curator - quality free historical images
• MAPCO historical maps
• Glasgow University Library's Incunabula project (very rare books)
• The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Teaching Artist course
• Life beyond the PhD
• and much, much more!

Found and Favourited - Links you might Like

Where are your favourites stored? On a device or in the cloud?  Whittaker likes cloud-based Diigo, so that's the first favourite link to share today:-

www.Diigo.com 

The fact that there's an android app (PowerNote) which syncs with Diigo is of course a powerful incentive to use it all the more.

Evernote is another useful tool, to keep track of all manner of action-lists and memos:-

www.Evernote.com

But let's get back to those favourites.  Whittaker's recent Diigo links include these:-

• Burns Scotland - http://www.burnsscotland.com/ (does what it says, authoritatively and without kitschy tartan gimmickry)
• Book Riot - a blog about books - http://bookriot.com/
• Scottish Music Centre - Opportunities and Competitions page:- http://www.scottishmusiccentre.com/competitions/
• Khan Academy - have you heard about 'Flipping the classroom'?  Online teaching using YouTube and student-led learning, as advocated by Salman Khan:- https://www.khanacademy.org/  (The Whittaker Library is buying Khan's book - we'll tell you when it arrives.)
• Fresh on the Net - share your tracks here! http://freshonthenet.co.uk/submit/  Tom Robinson tells you about the scheme here:-

• "This blog grew up out of a radio show called BBC Introducing: Fresh On The Net (read more) which I hosted on BBC 6 Music from October 2007 to April 2012.  Through the show I encountered many gifted individuals who shared my enthusiasm for new music and a dozen of them have now joined me here online under the name Team Freshnet. Our mission remains the same: to promote independent music making in all it forms – and to connect listeners with new music and musicians with new listeners."
  

 

New Links for Trad Musicians

I've just been checking my Diigo account, and I see I've recently saved several links that our Scottish trad musicians might like:-

• The Archive Project: an Adventure in Traditional Scottish Music - blog about a project to get people using tunes in the School of Scottish Studies Archives:- "Welcome! This is a project from the Edinburgh Youth Gaitherin and School of Scottish Studies Archives (funded by Creative Scotland through the Youth Music Initiative) running for a year from June 2012 – June (or beyond!) 2013.  It aims to bring seven young people (aged 15-23) into the Archives and create innovative new traditional music as a result."
• Forthcoming Minstrelsy Concert at The Sage Gateshead -  promoted by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 23 June 8 pm.
• Society of Antiquaries of Scotland - has been studying the history of Scottish culture and archaeology for over 200 years!
• Ronnie Gibson explores the Atholl Collection of Scottish music at Perth's A K Bell Library - blogpost. 
• Archived article about James Scott Skinner, from the Box and Fiddle magazine archives. Scott Skinner was a fabulous Scottish fiddler who also published fiddle music.

A week in the life of a Librarian / Musicologist

"I wish I were a cloud, a-floating in the sky ...." *

Do you use Diigo? It's a cloud-based way of saving favourite weblinks, so you can access them on any device.

And if someone shares their Diigo list with you, you can access their carefully-curated collection of links on particular subjects of mutual interest.

This week, Karen has discovered and saved weblinks on traditional music, libraries supporting research, the Glasgow Women's Library, Paul Rolland on string-playing technique, playwright David Greig, the Edinburgh Harp Festival, world music, and some early Scottish fiddle and song collections.  There's too much to share each link on Whittaker Live, but you can view Karen's list here.  And there's a Diigo feed on this Whittaker Live blog, if you scroll down the right-hand side.


* Quote from Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Joseph Ritson was a Cranky Old Curmudgeon

Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), Perfectionist Personified

A pernickity, fussy, argumentative old gentleman who eventually went mad and set light to his home, Joseph Ritson was not always the easiest person to get on with.

However, his Scotish Songs collection of 1794, in two volumes , was seminal and highly thought of, for several decades after its publication.  (It was by no means his only contribution to poetry and song-collecting, but it is the most useful for Scottish music students.)

We do have a copy in the Whittaker Library, but digital links are always worth having.  Here's an Internet Archive link to a 19th century reprint.  Save it to your favourites/ Diigo account!

Click here.

Important announcement if you use Diigo

Diigo's domain was hacked for 48 hours earlier this week - they used Diigo.net temporarily, but all is back to normal now at http://diigo.com.  All you need to keep track of your social bookmarking favourites!

Diigo kept us informed of progress, and assure us our data was not compromised, so full marks to them for keeping the show on the road during the crisis.

I'm now seconded part-time to a research project on historic Scottish fiddle accompaniments - as my Diigo favourites probably reflect.

Digitised Sound for Scottish Musos

Karen just gave a talk to students on the BA Scottish Music course, to introduce key streamed sound resources.

Two directly relevant ones -

1. Tobar an Dualchais (free)
2. British Library Sounds (Whittaker Library subscribes)

And two mainly classical ones, so you can see what classical musos have done with your Scottish tunes!

1. Naxos Music Library
2. Classical Music Library (Alexander Street Press)

See Karen's Storify story about all four databases - here.

Karen's favourite social media tools

Karen introduced Diigo, an excellent social media tool for saving your favourites 'in the cloud'.  This is Karen's Scottish music Diigo list.

If you Tweet, there are other useful websites that you might benefit from - Tweetdeck makes it easier to follow scheduled conversations; and the Buffer app allows you to schedule tweets throughout the day. 

Diigo social bookmarking ambassador?!

Diigo - social bookmarking

Whittaker feels he really should be appointed an honorary Diigo Ambassador for singing Diigo's praises so regularly!

These days, most of us need access to our favourite links via various devices.  If you haven't tried Diigo yet, why not give it a whirl before you accumulate too many scraps of paper with weblinks on!

Here:-

http://www.diigo.com/index

And here's mine:-

http://www.diigo.com/user/karenmca

(As you can see, I'm totally sold on it!)

Leigh Landy - Devising Dancing

Prof. Leigh Landy is a professor at De Montfort University.  His book Devising Dancing and Music Idox (Idee fixe) is on one of our reading lists.

The book is out of print.  However, all Landy's writings are available on his website - problem solved!

So, for Leigh Landy writings- don't lose this link!  (Why not start your own Diigo account for keeping all those vital links together? (Here's my Diigo collection.) 

Jubilee

The day of the Queen's Jubilee

Was wet, to a chilly degree 

But the Monarch just smiled, 

Her subjects went wild,

And we Scots saw it all on TV.

c. KEMcAulay 

3.6.2012

Image from The Telegraph newspaper's blog

We have a small exhibition of Coronation and Jubilee-related material in the Whittaker Library - do come and see.  (If you speak to our Archive Officer, there's more ...!)

And we've compiled some Jubilee-related search-findings from the library catalogue: take a look at this Diigo Jubilee list (social bookmarking) list.

• Video: Diamond Jubilee Pageant's Musical Finale - featuring our opposite numbers down in London -  the very wet Royal College of Music Chamber Choir!  (From BBC website).
• BBC Diamond Jubilee website is http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17500000

Do you use social bookmarking?

Diigo and Delicious are just two ways of saving your favourite websites "in the cloud" - in other words, save them on the web so you can access them anywhere, any time, on any web-enabled device.

See how 'Whittaker' (oh, okay, Karen McAulay) uses it to store useful websites that might come in handy at a later date.  Just scroll down this page to find the block of Diigo links.  Enjoy!

• http://diigo.com 
• http://www.diigo.com/user/karenmca (Karen's Diigo links) 
• http://www.delicious.com/

Diigo - save those favourites

With the news that Yahoo won't be continuing to support Diigo indefinitely, fans of social bookmarking have identified Diigo as a new, viable alternative. Indeed, it's arguably better, offering some of the features of Zotero as well as the bookmarking capabilities of Delicious.

• Transferring your favourites from Diigo to Delicious is a doddle.
• Access your favourites from your PC, android or other device with ease
• Users of RSAMD Moodle will find Diigo endorsed by our Moodle gurus too
• Musings about librarianship - a blog from Singapore comments on Diigo

Visit www.diigo.com to get started.