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. This web-based version was written 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 dances, formations, people, publications, albums, recordings, and tunes. Runs rings around the competition!
• Includes Eric Ferguson's cribs and MiniCribs and over 2000 Pilling-style diagrams for dances.
• Catalogues more than 1000 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 programmes and producing cribs and diagram sheets a breeze.*
• Publish event programmes, class logs, and lists of your favourite dances.*
• Embed “live” dance lists on your own web pages.
• Collections allow convenient searching through 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 improve 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 is 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 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. If you are interested in SCD and have a little time to spare, why not dive in? See here for further information.

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