Library FAQs and Guides on our Library Portal ...

Welcome to the Whittaker Library (Turn on the sound - it's a chirpy wee tune!) You'll find all our library FAQs and Guides on our library portal pages. https://portal.rcs.ac.uk/library/library-guides/

A Film About RILM - Quality Music Info for Students and Researchers

RILM: Cool for Music School

Musicians, are you a student, researcher or educationalist?

If you've been a music student for a while, you've probably already heard of RILM - a database containing abstracts (summaries) of articles and other publications about music.  You can search by keywords and authors - it's great, a really useful service.  You'll find the link to the Whittaker Library RILM subscription on our library databases page, and also on our Mahara e-resources page, accessible to staff and students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  We've put a brief guide on the Mahara server, too. 

However, it's also worth noting that there's a video about it on the RILM website.  Access it HERE.

If you're a researcher, or publish scholarly writings about music, here's something you might have forgotten about: You can upload your own abstracts directly to RILM via their  submissions page.  It gets your scholarship 'out there' faster, and helps raise your profile - what could be better?  Upload abstracts of your published music writings HERE.

RILM website (not the search interface) 

Elevator Pitch - The Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Another round of freshers' tours over!  We're running late induction sessions between Monday 30 September and Friday 4 October at 3.30 pm

If I was given the length of an elevator ride in which to tell you about the Whittaker Library, what would I tell you?

Three things!

• We're a friendly, helpful library staff, and there are subject librarians to offer subject assistance in music, drama and dance.
• The printed library guides are also available on Mahara.  If you've signed up for your Moodle account, then you'll be able to find Mahara and the Library group.
• Course reading lists are on Moodle itself, under the modules you're studying.

Vital links:-

• Moodle sign in here
• Library and IT pages here - for electronic resources, the catalogue and much more.

What We would Tell New Students

We're revising our Whittaker Library guides.  Whatever our staff and students play or sing, there's a guide to our library holdings.  And now we're working on the general guides - all the stuff about what we lend, how long we lend it for, how you can renew things, what happens with orchestral or choral materials ... and so on.  Sure, there's a lot on our website, but folk like to pick up a leaflet when they're in the library, too.

But then I started thinking.  What else would I tell new students?

Keep an accurate list of everything you read.  Keep it electronically, whether with software (Mendeley, Zotero, or Endnote) or just a well-formatted Word list.

Even if you haven't taken notes on a book or journal article, you could make a quick note of what it was about. Even a sentence will do - it might help you later when you're trying to remember what you read, or where you read something!

Always have a notebook handy, or use Evernote on your electronic devices - or some other cloud-based document.

If you're a research student, sign up to Zetoc (http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/) or JournalTocs (http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/) - "Toc" stands for Table of Contents.  These services scan journal contents pages, then you get sent email alerts when new articles are published in your field.  Cool, eh?

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