When a dance occurs in several publications, we must decide which of them is most important, because in places where we can only list a single publication it should be the most important one. Generally, publications by RSCDS HQ are more “important” than other publications because they get the widest exposure, and it is most likely that people will have access to them. For example, the very popular dance, Culla Bay, was published privately by Ann Dix in her book, Reel Friends, but was then picked up by the Society and republished in Book 41, The Millennium Dances. Vastly more people will own a copy of Book 41.
Here are the priority values that must be used in the database. Note that lower values mean higher priorities.
DO NOT TOUCH the priorities for RSCDS dances without asking Anselm first. If you do, you’re liable to break the “RSCDS Index to Dances”, and that will make you very unpopular with Anselm because he has to debug and fix it again.
We simply assume that these are more “important” than publications by random individuals.
These are books and individual leaflets that people have put out under their own steam.
The leaflet series have lower priority because people tend to put dances out as leaflets first and then publish them in a book later. Once that happens, the book usually gets wider exposure and becomes the primary source.
“8x32” used to be a blog run by Lara Friedman-Shedlov where “experimental” dances were posted. These were sometimes superseded by actual publications featuring these dances (occasionally with more or less radical changes).
These are publications of dance instructions that are inofficial or fall short of the definitive gospel in other ways. Most notably, this includes Scottish Country Dances in Diagrams (a.k.a., the Pilling book, or “wee green book”).
If there is ever a 10th edition of SCDiD, that will become priority 101 and all the others will shift one place to make room.
The publication with the highest priority (lowest numeric priority value) will be displayed as the “main publication” in all contexts where only one publication can be shown for a dance, e.g., in crib sheets.
As a slight anomaly, in the RSCDS repertoire, individual numbered books are ranked higher than combined books even though the combined books tend to have more up-to-date dance descriptions. This is because RSCDS dances are customarily cited by their (single) book number, and it would look strange if we referred to combined books instead. RSCDS dance teachers in our audience are expected to know about the combined books and their relationship to the individual numbered books.
Priorities for the existing publications in the database have been adjusted accordingly (I hope). Mistakes are possible and should be corrected or called in as appropriate.
This policy does not cover priorities for tunes, which will be addressed separately.
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