New Imported Records from France

Thursday, March 5, 2020

After receiving a batch of records from the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and after an intensive period of technical preparations, we gained some experience and found some ways for an automated data conversion. In fall 2019, ca. 19,000 records for handwritten musical sources were then transferred to the internal RISM database, Muscat. Not all of them are in the RISM online catalog yet, but for now, the first portion can be searched:

• The records for manuscripts from the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Paris (F-Pa) are part of a single manuscript anthology with excerpts from fifteen different operas by Jean-Baptiste Rameau (RISM ID no. 840017895).

• Up to now, RISM only had printed editions from the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra in Paris (F-Po). Now, music manuscripts will join them. Around 100 of them were published with the February update of the catalog. As you might guess from the name of the institution, the manuscripts are for stage works and excerpts from them.

In order to find or browse the manuscripts separately from the printed editions in RISM, use the Advanced Search (see image). Select the field Library siglum and enter a library such as F-Po. In the next field, select the field Source type and enter print, but then use a Boolean operator to exclude them: select not at the very beginning of the field. Your results will be the manuscripts from F-Po.

• RISM had 800 manuscripts from the Département de la Musique of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (F-Pn) before the data import. In the meantime, a further 1,000 have been added, mostly by Jean-Baptiste Rameau, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, François-Joseph Gossec, Charles-Hubert Gervais, and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

We will soon publish the rest of the data. All imported records include a link to the original French record.

Category: Library collections