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Muscat

Muscat is RISM’s central cataloging program for musical sources (manuscripts, printed music, libretti, and treatises). It is developed as an open-source project by RISM under the leadership of the RISM Digital Center and in close collaboration with the Editorial Center and the working groups. For more information about the project, its philosophy and its history, visit the Muscat Project website.

About Muscat

As of January 2024, Muscat contains in total 1,658,000 musical sources, 154,000 authority records for personal names, 26,900 institutions, and 15,200 records for secondary literature. Muscat incorporates sources from the RISM series A/I, A/II, and B/I, as well as sources outside these series.

Muscat is a multilingual, open source, web-based, platform-independent program. It uses MARC21 and thus has an internationally widespread and standardized data model at its core. Additional features include:

  • Built-in version control to identify changes
  • Ability to leave comments for sources and authority files
  • Intuitive management of digital objects
  • Ability to create folders to organize work
  • Link to VIAF to import personal name authority records
  • Custom-built module to display incipits
  • Expanded ability to add guidelines in different languages
  • Integrated full online catalog search with geovisualizations
  • Interfaces in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish, with a translations in Korean in preparation
  • Separate training server for practice

Technical requirements

  • Muscat is platform independent and works on both Macs and PCs.
  • Access is through a URL and requires an Internet connection. No installation is required, and nothing needs to be downloaded.
  • Muscat works best on screens that are at least 1366 x 768 pixels.
  • Muscat is optimized for Firefox and Chrome. Do not use Internet Explorer!

More information

Each contributor receives their own Muscat login, which is tied to the institution(s) that they will edit. Please contact the RISM Editorial Center if you have any questions about using Muscat, contributing to RISM through Muscat, or if you wish for a live demonstration of Muscat. Contact Rodolfo Zitellini for technical and software development questions.