Funding Renewed for KoFIM Berlin Project

Martina Rebmann

Thursday, February 19, 2015

The following announcement has come to us from Martina Rebmann (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin):

With generous support from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the KoFIM Berlin project (Kompetenzzentrum Forschung und Information Musik/Center of Excellence for Research and Information in Music) will continue at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin for another three years. The goal of the project is to catalog ca. 7,500 autograph music manuscripts–the core of the Music Department’s collection from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century–according to scholarly standards in the RISM database and make them searchable online. In this project, now halfway through, the works of ca. 1,600 composers are being processed. The four staff members working on the project go far beyond conventional cataloging practices: copyist hands and watermarks are being comprehensively digitally documented for the first time based on a larger pool of manuscripts. Using the latest technology–a thermographic camera that was purchased by the SBB–watermarks in paper can be made visible through digital means. A special project photographer has been hired who feeds the findings into the Watermark Information System, where they can be researched.

Completely new relationships between the manuscripts come to light through such scholarly documentation as notes on provenance are also carefully researched, allowing a chronology of the works. Research infrastructure in the discipline of musicology and related areas are significantly advanced. This project thus contributes to a sustainable improvement of the research environment for source-oriented musicology at both the SBB and in the digital world.

More information can be found on the project’s website.

Photo: Music manuscript being analyzed with an infrared camera on a Graz book table

Category: Library collections