Talk:Song

Andy Turner has been looking at how song information might be organised. He has produced 4 schemes which are viewable File:Songs scheme.pdf

Comments welcome.

--JohnnyAdams 12:28, 3 April 2007 (BST)

Johnny has now changed the heading to 'Books since 1900', which works better, I think. Usual (though not invariable) practice is to italicize book titles and enclose song titles in single quotes.

Malcolm Douglas--MalcolmDouglas 02:31, 2 April 2007 (BST)

I think we may need to look at these section soon anyway. If we have "last century" and "song books", where to we put the book? On another point, I am sailing on using italics for both book titles and song titles. Do we need to use different formats for these two perhaps?

Pete Wood--PeteWood 22:44, 1 April 2007 (BST)

One thing. 'Books from the last century'. Since we're only a few short years into the current one, mightn't it be a good plan to say instead '20th century'? For most people presently able to read, the 'last century' is still the 19th, so something a little more specific might perhaps be helpful.

--MalcolmDouglas 1 April 2007

Pete, My feeling is that as information builds, then detail is pushed deeper. The big list of singers is obviously too long for a front page so it can be easily transferred to a level back and have a link leading to it.

The idea is that we can reorganise the structure as we share ideas and develop a sense of the way things will develop. The way you have categorised below seems eminently sensible and would be a way forward.

I would add 1.5 Rural Songs and note that some songs may be accessed via more than one route

--JohnnyAdams 12:57, 28 March 2007 (BST)

I'm new to this, as are most of us I suspect, but my instinct is that we should talk a bit to each other even at this early stage. My first question for the group is-who is our readership? People will come to the site with very different levels of knowledge. The "First Level" should be very gentle, assuming the reader has no knowledge of folk song, but constructed so that the person wil be stimulated to go into gradually increasing depth, as well as enabling afficianados to get quickly to where they want to be. At the moment, we scroll down the song page, and get a long list of names of singers, which is excellent stuff for "Level 2 or 3" user, but perhaps offputting to the casual "Level 1" visitor. Same applies to song types, which I have started but certainly not finished. So perhaps we should be able to scroll down less, but click on more?

I'm loth at the moment to go in and make wholesale changes without some discussion, but for now, would not this a be more logical first level structure for the Song Section?

1. 1 English Songs

   * 1.1 Sea Songs
   * 1.2 Industrial Songs
   * 1.3 Love Songs
   * 1.4 Ceremonial Songs

1. 2 Traditional Singers

   * 2.1 English Singers
   * 2.2 Scots Singers
   * 2.3 Irish Singers
   * 2.4 North American Singers 

1. 3 Performance

1. 4 Resources

     4.1 Recordings
           4.1.1 Commercially Available Recordings
     4.2 Books & Bibliographies
     4.3 Indexes

Pete Wood