This Saturday 26th August 2017 at Sheffield University you can get a deeper insight into conducting research online with the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library team. This is a free half-day workshop led by Laura Smyth, Bryony Griffith and Julia Bishop (Julia wrote music chapters of the recently reviewed Folk Song of England which has just been published).
With a growing number of digital resources available it can all be a bit daunting. This workshop is aimed at helping those that are new or have some experience .
Whether you are researching for performance, teaching or study, the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s digital archive is the leading online resource of folk materials. Currently containing 22 digitised collections and detailed song and tune indexes, it has just gone live in a bigger and even better version, with over 2000 more songs from Britain and America, and new ways of searching them.
Led by the VWML Director, Laura Smyth, the morning session of this workshop is an opportunity to get practical experience in using the VWML website to find the materials you want. Find out what’s available, how to search for it, and how to get the most out of this unique resource.
The workshop will feature the Carpenter Folk Online project which has seen the addition of the impressive collection of folk song and drama made by J. M. Carpenter in 1930s Britain. Previously only accessible at the Library of Congress, the project has now made freely available a wealth of new songs, tunes, mummers’ plays and more. Discover more about these exciting developments and the collection’s riches from Julia Bishop, Co-Investigator on the Carpenter Folk Online Project, and sample a few for yourself!
The afternoon session is led by Bryony Griffith, an award-winning English fiddle player and singer from West Yorkshire with twenty years’ experience researching folk material and devising innovative ways of presenting it for use in performance and education with children, young people and adults. Bryony will teach songs from VWML digital archive, demonstrating how they were used in primary schools to create fun and memorable learning experiences about Coal Mining and local history, and illustrate how they were developed to create new educational resources. Bring your singing voices!
The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in traditional song, music, dance, drama and custom. No previous experience of using digital archives or traditional music is necessary. Come and tell us more about how you’d like to use the archive and the materials you are interested in!
The workshop will take place at Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 34 Gell Street, Sheffield S3 7QY.
You can book (for free) and find out more here: https://www.vwml.org/events/upcoming-events/4653-finding-folk-music-online