How to Integrate RISM Searches on Your Website

Thursday, November 27, 2025

Have you ever launched RISM searches directly from the rism.info website? You simply enter a phrase in the search box at the top of the page, hit Enter – and you can view the results right away in RISM Online or the RISM Catalog (depending on your preset choice). Since this option is offered on our main website, the search is run in the entire RISM database. However, did you know that it is quite simple to add a similar search box to your own website or that of your institution, which can offer search results specific to your interests or your own collection?

If your institution has a music collection cataloged (in whole or in part) in RISM, you can set up the search box so that it will search only these items – essentially providing you with a catalog of your own music collection. It is equally simple to run the search only on the items from a given country (according to the terminology of RISM Online: in a “national collection”), a solution that might be convenient for, for example, the website of a national library, the national branch of an international organization (like IAML), or indeed for any music-related institution in a given country that might wish to add a fancy touch to its website to better inform (as well as entertain) its visitors. Furthermore, archives or research institutions focusing on a single composer can integrate a search box that offers their visitors only those hits from the RISM database that are related to that person. There are many other parameters that you can predefine for your search and the options are really unlimited. More precisely: the limits can be set by you, depending on what you wish to see on your own website.

Although setting up such specialized searches through the RISM Online Search API is by no means rocket science, it does require some technical expertise that not every one of our readers might have. That said, the person maintaining your website should take a look at the brief description of the technical details. We hope that this possibility might be of interest to some of you, and would love to hear back (at contact@rism.info) from any institutions or individuals who take the time to integrate a RISM search on their website.

Catégorie: RISM Digital Center