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!

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!)

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.