REPERTOIRE INTERNATIONAL DES SOURCES MUSICALES (RISM)
Zentralredaktion Frankfurt
Annual Report, 2013
Foundation: Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik e.V. Kassel. Honorary President: Dr. Harald Heckmann, Ruppertshain; President: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christoph Wolff, Cambridge/Leipzig (until 22 November) – Dr. Wolf-Dieter Seiffert (from 22 November); Vice President: Catherine Massip, Paris (until 22 November) – Prof. Dr. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (from 22 November); Secretary: Dr. Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, Munich (until 22 November) – Dr. Laurent Pugin (from 22 November); Treasurer: Prof. Dr. Klaus Pietschmann, Mainz; co-opted members of the board: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Konrad, Würzburg; Prof. Dr. John H. Roberts, Berkeley. Commission Mixte (Delegates from AIBM and SIM): Chris Banks (AIBM); Prof. Dr. Sergio Durante (SIM), Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi (AIBM); Dr. John B. Howard (AIBM); Prof. Dr. Ulrich Konrad (SIM); Prof. Dr. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (SIM), Catherine Massip (AIBM); Dr. habil. Christian Meyer (SIM); Prof. Dr. John H. Roberts (AIBM); Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christoph Wolff (SIM). Director of the Zentralredaktion: Klaus Keil, Frankfurt.
Address: Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik, Zentralredaktion an der Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Sophienstr. 26, D-60487 Frankfurt am Main, tel.: +49 69 706231, fax: +49 69 706026, e-mail: contact@rism.info, internet: www.rism.info.
Publishers: Series A/I, series B volumes VIII,1-2, and series C: Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel; series A/II, Internet database: EBSCO Publishing, Inc., Birmingham, AL, USA; series B (except for volumes VIII,1-2): G. Henle Verlag, Munich.
Personnel: Dr. Martina Falletta, Stephan Hirsch, Klaus Keil, Guido Kraus, Alexander Marxen, Jennifer Ward, Isabella Wiedemer-Höll.
The International Inventory of Musical Sources (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales – RISM), with the Zentralredaktion in Frankfurt, is under the patronage of the Association Internationale des Bibliothèques, Archives et Centres de Documentation Musicaux (AIBM) as well as the Société Internationale de Musicologie (SIM) and is responsible for documenting printed and manuscript transmissions of music worldwide. Series A/I indexes individual prints published between 1600 and 1800, and series A/II indexes music manuscripts after 1600, with extensive descriptions, including their locations. Both series originally were to be arranged alphabetically by composer name, as is the case in the printed volumes of series A/I. Since both series are now published as databases, far more access points can be offered. Series B is designed to cover specific categories of repertory, such as printed anthologies from the 16th to 18th centuries, German hymns, source literature on music theory in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Persian, etc. Series A/I, A/II, and B are supplemented by series C, the Directory of Music Research Libraries.
Series A/I: Issued in nine main and four supplementary volumes, and on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM of series A/I was released in December 2011. It contains all of the entries from volumes 1-9 and 11-14. The CD-ROM data have been authorized for publication in the RISM online catalog beginning in 2014. The data are currently being prepared for publication and future editing by the RISM working groups.
Series B: Thirty-one volumes in this series have been published so far, most recently RISM B/XIII,1: Hymnologica Slavica. Volume I, Hymnologica Bohemica, Slovaca, Polonica, Sorabica. Notendrucke des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Karol Hławiczka, Jan Kouba, Leon Witkowski, Jan Raupp, Marie Skalická. Revised and supplemented by Teresa Krukowski and Gerhard Schuhmacher (Henle Verlag: Munich, 2012).
For volume B/I, anthologies, Howard Mayer Brown had prepared a revision of the entries for sources published between 1500 and 1550. This revision will not appear in book form but will be incorporated into the online catalog.
Three special volumes entitled Das Tenorlied were published between 1979 and 1986.
Series C: Five volumes have appeared to date, as well as a special volume issued by the RISM Zentralredaktion, RISM Bibliothekssigel-Gesamtverzeichnis (RISM Library Sigla, Complete Index). Since that time, the index of sigla has been made available through RISM’s website as a searchable database, which also contains contact information such as mailing address, website link, and e-mail address. From the siglum entry, one can directly access the holdings of a library as indexed in the online catalog. Together with the AIBM Publications Committee it has been possible to issue revised versions of volumes II and III,1. These replace the existing volumes II and III, with the exception of the section containing Italian sigla. An agreement has been made with the AIBM working group Access to Music Archives to revise the series, which will be edited and published as an online database.
Series A/II: This series is a complete documentation of manuscripts containing polyphonic music written after 1600. Series A/II is the most comprehensive endeavor and the main focus of the whole of RISM’s work at present. Contributors from more than 30 national groups around the world document music manuscripts at their home libraries and archives. The national working groups use computers to enter their descriptions and the majority of them connect directly to the RISM server through the internet. To facilitate this, the cataloging program Kallisto is available from the Zentralredaktion free of charge. The transmission of digital information reduces the amount of editorial work required and speeds up completion of the project.
Since the start of the project a total of ca. 880,000 entries have been registered at the RISM Zentralredaktion in Frankfurt.
The following groups created records using Kallisto in 2013: Austria, Innsbruck: 1,669 [see note 1] records, Lambach: 838 records, Linz: 557 records, Salzburg: 7 records + 38 records (Mozarteum), Schlägl: 192 records, Vorarlberg: 95 records, Vienna (Akademie der Wissenschaften): 4,553 [see note 2] records, Belgium: 53 records; Czech Republic, Bruno: 3 records, Prague: 2,708 records; Germany, Dresden: 5,230 records, Munich: 9,233 records, partnership with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: 2,533 records; Hungary: 391 records; Italy, Rome (DHI): 90 records; Lithuania: 10 records; Mexico: 1 record; Poland, Gdansk: 1 record, Krakow: 117 records, Lublin: 2 records, Opole, 78 records, Warsaw: 765 records, Wrocław: 67 records; Russia (Glinka Museum, Moscow): 59 records; Slovakia: 313 records; Slovenia: 360 records; South Korea: 641 records; Ukraine: 96 records; Venezuela: 15 records.
In addition, 508 catalog records on paper title cards were sent from Russia (Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Moscow) and entered into Kallisto by the Zentralredaktion along with a further 1,887 records from older holdings.
Some working groups use their own cataloging systems and sometimes send their data after a longer preliminary period. We wish to mention the following in particular:
England/United Kingdom: A database of music manuscripts was developed together with the RISM office in Ireland. The database is freely available online (www.rism.org.uk). In the first half of 2011, 55,000 records were converted and transferred to the RISM database. The data were published in the RISM online catalog in December 2011.
Switzerland: The Swiss working group did not participate in the changeover to Kallisto. Instead, they have been using a program that employs the same data model of the British working group. The data that have been entered since then will be transferred to the RISM database when the new cataloging program is developed (see below).
France: At the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a database was created of music manuscripts kept there, from which a book catalog (of composers with last names beginning A–B) was published in 1999. In addition, as part of the series Patrimoine musical régional, handwritten and printed materials in the provinces were processed and also published as a book catalog. In the meantime, records from RISM France can be found in the portal “Catalogue collectif de France” (https://ccfr.bnf.fr/portailccfr/jsp/public/index.jsp). There are records for 8,000 manuscripts that were created before 1820 (by composers with last names beginning A–H) and 15,600 items of printed music before 1800 from the Département de la musique, and ca. 34,000 records from the Patrimoine. An agreement has been made to receive this data and sample titles were tested.
Italy: Coordinated by the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali (URFM) in Milan, various regional groups are working on the documentation of manuscripts, prints and other sources. Records are entered into the national SBN Musica database. RISM is very interested in obtaining this data, but no agreement has been reached so far. At the same time, the working group Istituto di Bibliografia Musicale (IBIMUS) in Rome has been using the program PIKaDo and sends their records directly to the Zentralredaktion in the course of their projects. Kallisto will be implemented when the next projects begin.
Furthermore, there are partnerships with individual institutes:
As part of a project sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Historical Institute in Rome is undertaking work on the collections of two Roman princely houses. The sources are being digitized and described using Kallisto in accordance with RISM standards.
An agreement was made with the Richard Strauss Quellenverzeichnis to have the descriptions of musical sources contained on their website (www.rsi-rsqv.de) also appear in the RISM online catalog. During the reporting period, 650 records were imported.
As part of the KoFIM project (Kompetenzzentrum Forschung und Information Musik/Center of Excellence for Research and Information in Music), the collection of autograph manuscripts at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin are being digitized and described using RISM’s software. Not only will sources be recorded in the RISM online catalog, but links to their digitized counterparts will be added as well.
During the reporting period, the RISM manuscript database increased by an additional 33,000 entries and it now contains a total of ca. 858,000 records.
The CD-ROM of series A/II Music Manuscripts after 1600 was discontinued with the 16th edition (the 14th CD-ROM). It comprised a total of 614,000 entries, including a total of around 50,000 additional entries from three special files – one with composers (31,000 entries), library sigla (6,870 entries) and an index of the literature consulted for describing sources (4,000 entries).
This is the material which is still currently being offered as a subscription database by EBSCO Publishing Inc. (successor to NISC).
Since July 2010, RISM has made its online catalog freely available on the Internet. The development of the software for searching was made possible through collaboration between RISM and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The initial inventory of ca. 700,000 records has since been expanded by ca. 150,000 to make a grand total of around 851,532 records. On average, the online catalog was visited by about 7,756 people per month during 18,083 visits (annually: 93,075 people with 216,993 page views). The further development of the search functions, to be implemented in early 2014, will be carried out by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Since July 2013, the data of the online catalog have been offered as open data. In mid-2014, they will be made available as linked open data. This will make it significantly easier for the data to be used in scholarly and library pursuits, in particular as metadata for digital objects.
The online catalog, which is available on the Internet free of charge, motivates more and more people and institutions to contribute to the project. In particular, there is growing interest among individual institutions to see their holdings indexed in the RISM online catalog. The Zentralredaktion also increasingly receives suggestions and corrections from users.
The RISM Board of Directors has decided to have the new development of the cataloging program Kallisto be based on the MUSCAT program used by the British and Swiss working groups. The program is open source and platform independent.
The RISM Zentralredaktion considers one of its tasks to be to provide optimal technical and advisory support to the working groups. In technical areas, data exchanges and software development are in the foreground. Advisory support begins by training contributors in new or existing working groups, which this year has included courses held in the Czech Republic (Moravian Museum, Brno), Hungary (National Library, Budapest), Poland (university, Poznań), Russia (Glinka Museum, Moscow), Slovakia (National Library and university, Bratislava), and Ukraine (National Library, Kiev). From an editorial standpoint, the Zentralredaktion is responsible for unifying data and editing authority files: personal names, institutions, and (sacred) texts. This is carried out in close cooperation with the working groups, which receive continuous supervision. To improve communication with working groups, users, and other people interested in RISM, the Zentralredaktion has developed several tools in recent years:
The RISM website, developed with the cooperation of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur (Digitale Akademie) in Mainz, is constantly updated by the Zentralredaktion and the working groups. It enjoys increasing popularity, having welcomed 40,086 visitors this year, or about 3,340 visitors each month. In total, 1,239 people have registered on the website.
A RISM Facebook page appeals to a further international audience and has 880 fans.
The brochure RISM: An Overview may be obtained from the Zentralredaktion. It is available in an English-German version as well as English-Russian.
On Wikipedia, short articles in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish were written.
To mark its 60th anniversary, RISM hosted a conference together with the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz and the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. It took place from 4-6 June 2012 and was entitled “Music Documentation in Libraries, Scholarship and Practice.” Abstracts and papers are available on the RISM website under “Publications.”
Klaus Keil, January 2014
[1] This number includes 1,116 records that were transferred to Kallisto from separate files. These records appear in the RISM online catalog after editing.
[2] This number includes 4,432 records that were transferred to Kallisto from separate files. These records also appear in the RISM online catalog after editing.
