RISM at the IAML/IMS Congress in New York
Monday, August 17, 2015
Klaus Keil and Jennifer Ward from the RISM Zentralredaktion and Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, the president of the Association, attended the IAML/IMS Congress in New York from June 21 to 26, 2015. We were happy to see our colleagues from around the world and hear about their projects. The theme of this year’s congress was Music Research in the Digital Age.
The week kicked off with a beautiful evening cruise around the island of Manhattan, which was in honor of RILM’s 50th anniversary. The cruise was co-sponsored by the R projects.
As usual, RISM sponsored a large session on Thursday with five presentations as well as meetings of the Advisory Council and Commission Mixte. This year, we held an additional session that we called a Music Documentation Round Table with two presentations.
Full details about the presentations, as well as slides and minutes, can be found on our website. Presentations are also linked on the IAML website.
In the RISM session, Klaus Keil opened with news from the Central Office, including the new office, the addition of data from series A/I and B/I to the online catalog, Muscat, updating series C (the Directory of Music Research Libraries) with the IAML working group on Access to Music Archives, the user survey, and the new brochure. Sarah Adams reported on RISM work in the United States and commented on current directions in American musicology (more research on nineteenth and twentieth century music, less on older music) and how the US RISM holdings should or can reflect that. The presentations by Martina Rebmann and Kristina Richts were good illustrations of how RISM data can be employed in research projects by musicologists and librarians. Armin Brinzing spoke about libraries collaborating with RISM and thoughts on the longevity of data.
During our Music Documentation Round Table, Jennifer Ward talked about ways to contribute to RISM even when funding is tight or non-existent, and Cheryl Martin provided a case study of a library contributing to RISM with data from a library catalog. Ewa Hauptman‐Fischer showed the importance of looking at dedications on manuscripts to trace the history of the documents. In the round table discussion, results from the recent survey were briefly presented and we talked about ways to improve the presentation of RISM’s scope and content.
We also enjoyed discussions with the working group Access to Music Archives. More on that project will be reported in this space later this week. In addition, we had separate meetings with our colleagues from RISM national groups in Belgium, Poland, South Korea, and the United States where we discussed new and ongoing projects. Furthermore, discussions with colleagues from Belgium, Greece, Spain, and Taiwan planted seeds for what we hope will be close collaboration in the future.
Photo: Manhattan skyline (courtesy of J. Ward)
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