The MITFDC had a fairly large, though by no means complete, collection of records and tapes with recordings for international folkdancing. In the early days, this meant that someone had to pull the appropriate records out of the collection when a dance was programmed, either the programmer himself, a volunteer record runner (who often then got an automatic request), or whoever happened to be closest and remembered the number without looking it up. The last file below, is one of the lists that was used to look up recordings.
Important note: I just have a copy of the catalog, not the recordings, which are archived at the MITFDC. Here are my best suggestions for finding recordings
In later years, Sunday Night International Dancing and Wednesday Night Israeli Dancing went so a system of short tapes--one tape per dance recorded on both the front and back. In theory, if one stopped the tape just after it ended, then one could flip it over and play it from the other side without any rewinding being necessary. In practice, this didn't always work so well, though it may have been better than forcing people to *always* rewind to the beginning.
Tuesday Night Balkan Dancing (1967-1997 R.I.P) always had a repertoire too large to conveniently put on cassette tapes, particularly since different programmers would prefer different cuts for the same dance. The cassette tapes in the inventory were to cover dances that we did not already have in the record collection. An accurate RR guide was a necessity, and I ( Tom Roby ) undertook the necessary updating during the late 1980's.
What follows is a snapshot of the MITFDCRRG from about 1989. I think that few updates were made to it thereafter, though I could be wrong. The collection that we used to schlep within the student center (and all over campus in a pinch) consisted of 3 cases of twelve inch (and a few ten-inch) records numbered from A0--A1304, 2 (double) cases of seven-inch (often 45rpm) records, numbered B1--B1321, and one or more boxes of tapes, numbered TUE 1--960. The numbering scheme for the vinyl recordings was:
The Israeli collection was always kept separately, and changed far more rapidly than the international collection did during the eighties. Larry Denenberg took over that electronic catalog, and I only have a rather small database of those LP's. While I'm sure the serious Israeli dancer would find it hopelessly outdated, I've included it here for those whose interests is primarily in the moldy oldies. (This seems to include many Balkan and IFD enthusiasts...)
I hope that these lists might be useful to various folks, particularly:
The first few files below are all pure text files with space separating the various fields, and are completely devoid of diacriticals. I made the catalog with the dances sorted alphabetically simply with the (sort-columns) function in Gnuemacs. Ira Gessel has recently completed and kindly provided a TeX version of the catalog in which he added many of the diacriticals by hand. The TeX source, and required macros are available below for downloading, as well as a PostScript and PDF versions. Besides having diacritical, these versions also printout more nicely (assuming you can print PostScript or PDF files). By the way, check out Ira's 123 page MITFDC Songbook
The fields are as follows:
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