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Data Services

Overview

RISM is an international organization that documents and describes musical sources. Currently the database contains over 1.5 million records that describe sources in detail and may be consulted at RISM Online or the RISM Catalog.

In addition, RISM offers numerous supplemental opportunities for data analysis or to use the data in other projects.

Open Data

RISM releases all data under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY). This means that you are free to share and adapt our data with no restrictions, but you must provide public notice and attribution.

Identifiers

RISM identifiers are used to uniquely identify individual records for the purposes of referencing and citation in both print and electronic contexts. The short form of a RISM identifier consists of two components: a record type, and the record number, separated by a forward slash. The record type identifes the specific class of the identifer; for example, a record from our person authority or sources. The record number identifies the specific record. This number is unique to the record type. Since we publish both bibliographic and authority data in the same systems, both components of the identifier are necessary to uniquely identify all records.

This identifier format is designed to provide an unambiguous short form, so that RISM records may be easily citeable in print and digital publications. It is also designed to be consistent across all the different systems that publish and re-publish RISM data. A consistent identifier format also means that all RISM Online URLs (Universal Resource Locator) also serve as the URI for that record. They can be used both to identify a particular record in Linked Data systems, and to retrieve the data associated with that record.

Some examples may help illustrate these concepts. The RISM identifier for the composer “Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677)” is people/30009879. The people component identifies the record type, and 30009879 identifies the specific record within the authority records for personal names.

This may also be easily resolved to a specific record in RISM Online by adding https://rism.online/ to the front to form a full URL: https://rism.online/people/30009879. This is also a permanent link to the person authority record for Barbara Strozzi. If you are a RISM cataloger and have access to the Muscat cataloging tool, you can find this record by adding https://muscat.rism.info/admin/ to the identifier to form the URL https://muscat.rism.info/admin/people/30009879.

In addition to serving as a URL, a compact identifier may be used as a type of alias. This is a common practice in linked data systems. If we map the compact identifier prefix of rism: to https://rism.online/, then a full identifier may be constructed as rism:people/30009879. Systems that understand compact identifiers can expand this when necessary to form a full URL and URI for this particular record.

All records published by RISM follow these principles. For example, source records such as “Harmonice musices Odhecaton A” may be identified as sources/993103756, with all the previously described forms of expansion available for these records.

MARCXML Downloads

Monthly exports of the RISM data is available for download in MARCXML format on our Data Exports page.

Linked Data and Resolution Services

RISM data is available in several linked data contexts. Wikidata provides a RISM ID property, P5504, that may be used in Wikidata-oriented SPARQL queries. There is also a RISM Siglum property, P11550, that can be used as identifiers for institutions that have an assigned RISM Siglum.

We have a standard prefix and compact identifier, rism:, registered with the Identifiers.org Resolution Service. This can also be used to resolve RISM identifiers to records in the systems that support these types of identifiers.

For example:

The RISM Catalog provides the RISM data in Turtle format for download and import into linked data systems. Note that this data does not follow the RISM identifiers scheme described above.

RISM Online API

RISM Online has several web-based APIs (Application Programming Interface) available for public use. Details on how to use these APIs are available in the RISM Online Documentation. For most users this should be the preferred way of accessing and using the RISM data.

SRU Servers

The RISM data is also available through our SRU servers which may be used to retrieve the data as MARCXML. Details on how to use this service are available in the Muscat SRU Service Documentation.