Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all our lovely followers. I hope you all had a great holiday full of laughter, singing and parties.

Talking of singing, here is a link to The Big Orkney Song Project's version of the New Year Song. Every year we have a little bit more information about this song, which was once sung throughout Orkney on New Year's Eve.

And this year all the details, words and music can be found in a book & CD which was published in 2012. It's called "Voices in Chorus Songs and their stories from The Big Orkney Song Project" by Sarah Jane Gibbon. In this book you'll also find lots of information about other Orkney songs which the project gathered from our archive collection and the Orkney community.

"the men of a district travelled around the houses performing the song. An older man led the singing, the other men joined in the chorus, and one man carried a caisie (creel) on his back in which to gather food and drink. The bounty was shared out at the last house visited, where the men held a party." http://www.reverbnation.com/bigorkneysongproject/song/2535631-the-new-year-song

The book can be purchased here: http://www.orkneycommunities.co.uk/ORKNEYSINGERS/index.asp?pageid=3863

Orkney Folk Festival 2010

Today is the first day of Orkney's annual folk festival which showcases acts from down the road as well as across the sea. See here for all the acts who have been booked to appear. As you will see, the vast majority of events are sold out, but there are sometimes returned tickets at the door and the pubs of Stromness are sure to be filled with fiddles and accordions all week.

There is an archive connection to the festival in the form of the Song Shop Trio who you may remember performing on Radio Orkney during the Library and Archive Discovery Week. Sarah Jane of the trio is an archive employee and has been involved in the hugely successful Big Orkney Song project. This project is an attempt to collect, perform and make known the folk songs of Orkney. For some time now, a group of dedicated volunteers have been regularly visiting the archive in search of folk songs amongst the old newspapers, reel to reels and other documents.

We have also put together a small collection of material from the archive to celebrate, not only the folk festival, but the St Magnus festival which takes place later on in the Summer. Documents include original folk music collected by our very own photographic technician, photographs of various musical events, sheet music, programmes, bell music from the St Magnus Cathedral and a manuscript book of religious music that dates from around 1790.

New Year Song update

Thanks to Lynn (see comment below)for pointing out that you can listen to the New Year Song we posted yesterday on the wonderful Big Orkney Song Project website.

The Big Orkney Song Project is an effort to collect Orcadian songs either by research (here in the library and archive) or by sharing orally through the Song Share events that have been taking place over the last year or so. The project has received money from the Heritage Lottery Fund and is being overseen by Sarah Jane Gibbon ( a former archive employee), Amy Leonard and Emily Turton who, together, perform as the Songshop Trio.

Dreichy Thursday

I spoke too soon when I said we were getting less customers.

The 70th Anniversary of the Royal Oak disaster has brought many visitors to Orkney this week. We ended up organising a makeshift cinema in a meeting room so that we could show our commemorative videos to relatives of those who went down with their ship in 1939. The photographic archive has also received several orders for prints of our Royal Oak pictures.

We also seem to have a lot of visitors who are interested in other topics. All of the tables in the searchroom are occupied and each has it's own precarious tower of books and documents. Every researcher seems to have a laptop nowadays so the room is filled with the gentle click-clack of typing from both researchers and staff. The subjects being investigated today include:

Children's Reading Habits in Orkney 1930s - 1970s
Orkney folk songs
War Commemorations
Sir William Honeyman, Lord Armadale
West Mainland Young Farmers' Society