In this morning’s RLS team meeting, head of department Stuart Lewis laid down an unusual gauntlet: come up with blog posts related to (tomorrow’s) Eurovision Song Contest. Ever gluttons for punishment, we in the Library Digital Development team have attempted to trawl the collections looking for links. It’s fair to say that we’ve not done very well.

We started looking for unusual musical instruments in the MIMEd collection, but we can’t find any evidence of a pochette, serpent or ratchet ever having been used in Eurovision. We did find a harpsichord, but only in the orchestra pit of the 1969 event.

This, unfortunately, forces us to be particularly tenuous. Here’s a cringeworthy selection of links for you…

• Boom Bang-A-Bang! Here’s a link to our kettledrums.

• Puppet On A String? (if you only open one link, make it this one)

• We’ve got a barrel organ, which, looking at the selection of tunes it plays, is a veritable European jukebox.

• And, for no better reason than showing you this moonwalking Romanian chap, we also have some bagpipes.

Perhaps a more sensible angle would be to remind everyone that our musical instruments have undergone something of a Eurovision-esque journey, by virtue of their harvesting in the MIMO Project, joining up with representatives from juries in Sweden, France, Germany and Belgium, to name but a few. The vast majority of the instruments can now be found in Europeana, a resource which appeals to all continentophiles, and has everything you could wish for, bar the sarcastic Terry Wogan voiceover.

OK, that’s our attempt. Anyone care to top that? Enjoy yourselves tomorrow…

All at the Library Digital Development Team

* Allegedly, Molly is the name of this year’s UK entrant for Eurovision. Timely, eh?

…and if you’re STILL confused by the title, click here!

DISCLAIMER: Stay tuned for the full MIMEd collections in the new collections portal and LUNA imaging platform, which should arrive in the next few weeks!