Welcome to the Scottish Country Dance Database!

Overview

This database aims to be a comprehensive resource for Scottish country dancers, dance teachers, and musicians. It brings together information on Scottish country dances, formations, musical recordings, Scottish country dance tunes, and the people behind all of those — all conveniently linked together for easy perusal.

The database builds on the efforts of many people. Keith Napier and Peter Hastings pioneered the idea of indexing Scottish country dances and music. Alan Paterson started the project behind this database, compiling a very large repository of data and making it available to everybody. Eric Ferguson and Charles Upton, among others, have contributed cribs for dances. Diagrams are provided by Keith Rose and others. This web-based version of the database was built by Anselm Lingnau, who is also hosting it on his server. Countless volunteers have helped organise, improve, and correct the data — an ongoing effort.

Features

• Largest SCD database on the Web — contains comprehensive information on more than 21000 dances, plus formations, people, publications, albums/CDs, recordings, and tunes. Runs rings around the competition!
• Includes Eric Ferguson's e-cribs as well as MiniCribs — in excess of 13500 cribs, total — and in excess of 6100 “Pilling-style” diagrams for dances.
• Catalogues over 7300 curated videos for specific dances from YouTube and other sources.
• Offers “taster” snippets from recordings by many popular musicians and bands.
• Powerful search functions for dances and recordings.
• Rate and review dances.*
• Dance lists make devising social programmes and lesson plans a breeze.* Producing crib and diagram sheets has never been easier!
• Publish event programmes, class logs, and lists of your favourite dances — even on your own web site!*
• Embed “live” dance lists on your own web pages.
• Collections let you search for dances among exactly the publications you own (rather than all of the database).*
• The data is actively maintained and kept up-to-date, and new and exciting features are added all the time!

(* = Function requires free my.strathspey account.)

What you can do

Feel free to browse the database and use the information in it to further your and others' enjoyment of Scottish country dancing!

In spite of tireless efforts to the contrary, the database probably contains lots of errors and omissions. If you notice anything that seems wrong or looks fishy, please notify the maintenance team — most conveniently through the “Submit a Correction/Addition” button that is part of every data page. Also, please get in touch if you have or know of a resource that is not in the database at all and that you think ought to be added.

We're always on the lookout for more volunteers to help us improve the database further. If you are interested in SCD and have a little (or a lot of) time to spare, why not dive in? See here for further information. If you're a software developer, ideally with experience in Python and Django, and want to help improve the Strathspey server code, we might greet you with a red carpet, flowers, and a marching band.

If you would like to use the data in this database for other projects, you can download daily dumps of the database content (or as much of it as we can share — we don't include “personal” items like dance lists and collections) to use under a “Creative Commons” license.