Introducing the RISM Editorial Network
Balázs Mikusi
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) was officially founded in 1952, at the first meeting of a Commission mixte including delegates from the International Musicological Society (IMS) and the International Association of Music Libraries (IAML). This historic meeting took place in Paris, and it was there, in the Bibliothèque nationale, that the first RISM secretariat started its work the following year. However, the ambitious mapping of the sources that survived the war years required considerably more work capacity, and so in 1960 a RISM Zentralredaktion was established in Kassel, Germany. As the Paris office gradually faded out during the 1960s, the Kassel office became the prime mover behind the entire RISM project on an international level, as manifested in the nine thick volumes of the A/I series (Individual Prints before 1800) published between 1971 and 1981 (and further expanded with a four-volume supplement and an index volume later on). Nonetheless, while the headquarters of the project thus moved to Germany, the true foundation of RISM has remained – to this day – the wide international network of contributors who kept providing the editorial center with descriptions of sources in their own countries. It is their work in particular that allowed RISM to grow into the vast treasure trove of information that we know today.
Approaching the end of the intensive editing phase of the A/I volumes, the Zentralredaktion (nowadays mostly mentioned as RISM Editorial Center) could start focusing on the next major challenge: setting up the cataloging rules and the technical framework for the A/II series, meant to include “Music Manuscripts after 1600.” However, just as it had happened two decades earlier, a new effort of such dimensions required a more secure background which was eventually ensured by the admittance of the Kassel RISM office in the so-called Akademienprogramm of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. This program provides support from German state and federal funds specifically to long-term projects, and the Zentralredaktion (which in 1987 actually moved to Frankfurt am Main) was placed under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz.
While the A/II project has kept RISM busy ever since, the past decades saw many important changes in the technical realm: the first microfiche edition of the A/II series (1984), the introduction of the program PIKaDo for the cataloging of sources (1990), the publication of the source descriptions on CD-ROM (1995), the launch of a first internet database as a joint project of the Editorial Center and the U.S. RISM Office at Harvard University (1997), or the switch from PIKaDo to Kallisto (2006). And crowning all these developments, in 2010 the RISM database became available – entirely free of charge – to the widest international community, when the RISM OPAC went online in cooperation with the Bavarian State Library of Munich and the Berlin State Library – a change that also allowed RISM to offer its data as linked open data a few years later.
Nonetheless, the last decade proved no less busy with the introduction of the Muscat cataloging software for the international RISM community (2016), the development of new cataloging templates specifically for printed music in cooperation with the SLUB Dresden (2018), the restructuring of the Swiss RISM working group (the core developers of Muscat) as a new RISM Digital Center (2021), which also resulted in the development of RISM Online as an alternative gateway to the international database.
Needless to say, all of the above is but a very rudimentary outline of RISM’s history to date – which among others ignores the dozens of publications in the B series (for the most part prepared by external experts rather than the staff of the Editorial Center). That said, even this brief survey demonstrates two points of central importance:
(1) Major changes in both structure and workflow have been inevitable throughout RISM’s history – exactly so that the original goals could best be pursued under the ever-changing circumstances.
(2) Cooperations – whether between musicologists and music librarians at RISM’s very foundation, or between the RISM Editorial Center and other like-minded partners in later years – have long helped RISM in crucial moments to reach goals that no institutional actor could have achieved alone.
It is these two lessons that one has to keep in mind as RISM now yet again arrives at a point of substantial change. While the support under the auspices of the Akademienprogramm could be prolonged several times, with the approaching end of the last extension, the Zentralredaktion – which has been the very heart of RISM for over half a century – closes its doors for good at the end of June 2026. Since the services of the outgoing Editorial Center (in the fields of data and authority curation, training, communication, and so forth) remain essential for RISM as a whole, but could not be taken over by any single institution, a few long-standing partners of the Zentralredaktion across Germany have decided to join forces and establish a RISM Editorial Network. The members of this new Network are (in alphabetical order):
- Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz
- Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München
- Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
- Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) Dresden
- Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz
By dividing up the diverse duties of the Editorial Center, these partners agreed to secure all editorial services needed by those cataloging musical sources in the RISM database also in the future. The exact details of which partner takes responsibility for which task, should be of little relevance for the greater public, but over the past months we did our best to prepare all co-workers for their new duties, and we certainly hope that the transition will present RISM’s old and new cataloging contributors with but minimal inconvenience.
Overall, while throughout the past decades it was the prime responsibility of the Editorial Center to provide the intellectual background, as well as the technical infrastructure, for the international cataloging community, at this point we need to take a big step from a more centralized structure toward a network of cooperating institutions – a move which is in fact very much in keeping with RISM’s long history outlined above. As of July 2026, in a sense as a culmination of the gradual changes that already occurred over the past few years, the support of the global RISM community falls to two relatively new actors: the RISM Editorial Network (as the successor of the RISM Editorial Center) involving a handful of major institutions in Germany, and the RISM Digital Center (as a substantially redesigned successor of the former Swiss RISM working group) based in Bern. This is by all means a significant change regarding the overall structure of RISM, which requires us to come to terms with somewhat more complex workflows – while at the same time we dare hope that the increased internal diversity could in fact also prove a source of inspiration for RISM in the longer run.
With all of that in mind, please welcome the new RISM Editorial Network, and feel free to pose any further questions at contact@rism.info – our old contact address, which remains the same also after the change, just as in fact most of the things about RISM that should really matter.
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