Information: Remember when folkdance groups used to play Vinyl?

Did you have an index in which anyone could look up the location of dances, or did you depend on the memory of one or several fellow dancers?

–Tom Roby

Online: MIT Folk Dance Club Record Runner's Guide

The Masachusetts Institute of Technology Folk Dance Club (MITFDC) had a fairly large, though by no means complete, collection of records and tapes with recordings for international folk dancing. 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.

Nowadays, many groups have gone to systems of cassette tapes, or even minidisks. This frees dance leaders from the chore of looking things up and learning what dances come from the same country or same musicians, and other irrelevant trivia.

I hope that these lists might be useful to various folks, particularly:

Versions are available in plain text (without diacriticals) for easy incorporation into your own software. Versions with some (but not all) appropriate diacritical, are available in TeX, PostScript, and PDF formats (thanks to Ira Gessel).

I'll be happy to make corrections if anyone points them out to me. I'd also be pleased to know if anyone else finds it useful. I just used it today to lookup where to find "Ratevka," so I can make a better recording for the Berkeley Folk Dancers.