The 2018 Annual Report

Monday, February 25, 2019

The 2018 annual report for the RISM Central Office has now been published. You can read the report in its entirety on the RISM website. Here are some of the highlights:

Total records: Our contributors from all over the world have worked hard this past year to catalog music manuscripts, printed editions, treatises, and libretti. The RISM catalog currently has 1,115,800 records for musical sources.

Contributions from national groups: The following national groups created new records in Muscat, RISM’s cataloging program, totaling over 32,500 new records: Argentina, Austria, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Plans to import data: A data import is underway from Italy (ICCU). Records for music manuscripts will be published in the RISM catalog in 2019. There are also plans to import data from the national libraries of France, Spain, and Austria. Data from the Archivio della cantata italiana (Clori) will be transferred after the ICCU data. Test records were sent from the Seminario de Música en la nueva España y el México independiente at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). RISM will receive descriptions of the historical music collections from the Mexico City Cathedral.

Update on historical printed music editions: RISM is working together with the Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) in Dresden to update and improve descriptions of printed music in RISM. A comprehensive template has been developed for creating detailed catalog records in Muscat. This project in Dresden will serve as a model for others and they are planning on creating a handout for libraries that want to enhance or correct records for their printed materials in RISM.

Data from the B/I and B/II printed volumes are currently being revised (thanks to revisions carried out by Howard Mayer Brown and Gertraut Haberkamp). In addition, data from Early Music Online and the Catalogue of Early German Printed Music (VDM 16) are being incorporated and combined. These records will then be made available in the RISM catalog.

New release of the RISM catalog: In July 2018, a new version of the RISM catalog was released. It included major improvements, particularly a new interface that also works on mobile devices. The databases of people, institutions, and literature have also been incorporated into the search. An additional release is planned for the beginning of 2019 that will improve the search and display of printed music.

On average, the online catalog was visited by about 8,683 people per month over 22,317 visits (annually: 104,200 people with 261,800 visits and 20.4 million page views). The catalog is made possible thanks to a partnership between the RISM Central Office, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

Links to digitized music: In the online catalog, you can get direct access to images of the sources through links to digitized music: either limit before your search (Advanced search –> Digital copies only checkbox) or filter your results (Narrow results –> Digitized music). There are currently ca. 57,000 such links available.

Muscat: RISM’s cataloging program Muscat is running to the full satisfaction of its users. As a matter of course, it is continuously being developed, leading to new, smaller releases nearly every month. Muscat is developed and maintained through a partnership between the RISM Zentralredaktion and RISM Switzerland, whose contribution to Muscat is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Muscat is a platform-independent, web-based, open-source program. As such, it can be adapted to the needs of other projects so that the reuse of RISM data for scholarly projects can be made considerably easier. Concrete projects will try this out in 2019.

Social media: RISM is active on Facebook and Twitter. A new article on RISM was added to Wikipedia in Catalan. (Thank you, whoever that was!)

Articles mentioning RISM: The RISM project continues to be presented, referenced, and described in publications, including newspapers, scholarly journals, and research articles. Please look at the up-to-date bibliography here.

And, as always:

• Corrections welcome: The Zentralredaktion regularly receives suggestions and corrections from users. If you find something that should be corrected, please let us know by sending us your feedback and corrections.
• External databases welcome: RISM is interested in further partnerships with institutions and projects to import data, such as library OPACs or critical editions.
• Open data and linked open data: RISM data can be downloaded directly from the online catalog and reused under a CC-BY license. Libraries can therefore import records for their holdings into local catalogs. The Zentralredaktion has developed tools to simplify the data delivery process, including an SRU interface.

Here’s to a successful and productive 2019!

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Catégorie: Nouveautés

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