Acknowledgments

 I’m very grateful to those individuals who have helped me throughout the years of the Fiddler’s Companion. I have had the opportunity to thank several, but by no means all, in the Acknowlegements page of that index, to which I refer you should you be interested. With the launch of the Traditional Tune Archive, I would like to acknowledge the generous and invaluable support afforded me by the host of the Fiddler’s Companion, and now the Traditional Tune Archive, by Ibiblio, “the public’s library and digital archive.” Ibiblio, a cooperative run by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been a stable, consistent and dependable platform for my indexing work, and they have been very helpful in establishing this new (and much more complicated) research tool. I would also like to thank Valerio Pelliccioni, whose idea it was to apply the semantic wiki format to the Fiddler’s Companion, and who had the vision to see the research potential of the properties of traditional music in a relational database. Valerio’s organizing and programming skill, and his knowledge of semantic databases (along with his affinity for traditional music as a Northumbrian piper), has astonished me. He has made the project come alive in ways I never dreamed of. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the traditional music community on-line. In the past two decades there has been an explosion of individual projects, blogs, indexing projects, research projects, newsgroups, and databases about traditional instrumental music available on the World Wide Web, initiated and populated by individual effort and cooperative activity. I remember having to wait weeks for a desired text to be available through inter-library loan in the “old days,” much of which information is now available nearly instantly. However much I value the information, however, it is the collegial on-line discussions about traditional music that mean the most to me, and the relationships that have developed from them. Andrew Kuntz