Prologue Web archiving activities by General Collections in the last six months of 2021 is representative of at least six of the Hellenistic muses – music, dancing, and poetry (dance in this context being Scottish Country and Highland). Much of the activity builds on work carried out in previous years, particularly regarding music. While earlier […]
Tag: Music
Putting the Music Catalogue Online: Part 3 – What this project will do for you!
In our previous two blogs of the series we gave you a general overview of the Music Retroconversion Project that the National Library is currently working on, followed by a discussion of some of the different cards we’ve been converting and the challenges these have posed. This final blog describes the benefits the project will […]
Putting the Music Catalogue Online: Part 2 – So many cards, so many challenges!
In our previous blog of this series, we gave you a general overview of the Music Retoconversion Project that the National Library is currently working on. Here we will discuss some of the different cards we’ve been converting and the challenges these have posed. The catalogues contain two types of cards: regular bibliographic cards with […]
Putting the Music Catalogue Online: Part 1 – Project Background
The National Library is working on a project to transfer its music card catalogues to the library’s online catalogue. Up until now, to search for music materials, users had the option of physically searching the Main Music Card Catalogue in the reading rooms, or they could phone the library and the librarians would check through […]
Happy 60th Birthday Ian Rankin
Today marks the 60th birthday of the UK’s number one best-selling crime writer, Ian Rankin. To celebrate Mr. Rankin’s latest milestone, we thought it appropriate to dedicate this post to his other love: music.
Forty Years Gone: New Wave and Disco in 1978
The year 1978 saw a changing of the guard in popular music. The decade-long dominance of heavy blues-based rock was coming to an end and in its place two new genres, new wave and disco, would rise to attain massive worldwide popularity while at the same time becoming templates for popular music up to the […]
The music behind our Staffa display (17-27 August 2017)
In the 19th century many composers, including Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847), were inspired by Scottish literature to write music based on Scottish themes. The main influences were Ossian, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. Most major composers did not visit Scotland in person and so the inspiration remained cultural. However, Mendelssohn was one of the few […]
SGT. PEPPER: IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY
The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in the UK on May 26, 1967. It remains the third best selling album in the UK: only Queen’s Greatest Hits (1981) and Abba’s Gold: Greatest Hits (1992) have outsold it. To mark this anniversary, the National Library of Scotland has mounted a free display of […]
Music display at the National Library of Scotland
August has become a regular month for a small music display at the National Library of Scotland to coincide with the Edinburgh International Festival. A selection of items from the collections of the many musical works that will be performed over the coming month will be shown. A major theme this year is music related to the literary […]
Britain in Europe – Making your mind up
The British public will shortly be asked to decide how they would like to participate in Europe. To help you make your decision, we would like to point you in the direction of just some of our resources on this important topic.