Conference of the RISM Working Group Germany "Music Prints and Digital Transformation"

Thursday, October 2, 2025

The RISM Working Group Germany, in collaboration with the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB), is hosting an interdisciplinary conference on 13 and 14 November 2025. Under the title “Music Prints and Digital Transformation: Perspectives on Documentation, Representation and Interconnectivity”, experts from the fields of musicology, book studies, information science and art history will come together to discuss current approaches, methods and future possibilities for dealing with historical music prints in the digital age and to exchange ideas.

Music prints from 1600 to 1850 formed the source corpus with which RISM began in 1952. However, they lost prominence with the start of the cataloguing of manuscripts. The cataloguing of music prints was considered complete with the publication of the printed series A/I in 1981; the results were provisionally transferred to the RISM database and, following the development of a print template for the Muscat 2018 data entry programme, within the framework of the FID Musicology, a pilot set of 1,300 music prints from the 16th to 18th centuries was catalogued in depth.

Today, digital methods and technical tools have advanced further and open up new possibilities for gaining insights from these sources – through improved searchability, enhanced comparability and the representation of complex contexts. Therefore, the conference will focus on the interfaces between musicology, library cataloguing, research data management and information technology. The presentation of current IT standards and recent experiences with recognition programmes, among other things, will form the starting point for a discussion on useful possibilities to enhance the cataloguing of printed music.

Please register by 1 November 2025.

Programme and registration at https://slubdd.de/rism2025

 

Copyright: Photo of old prints ©Amrei Flechsig/ Binary Data 50 ©W. Rebel (cc by 3.0)

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Catégorie: Evénements

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