EarlyMuse Report Available Online

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Last May several representatives of the larger RISM community traveled to Wrocław to participate in a three-day meeting of the EarlyMuse network that seeks to establish “A new ecosystem of early music studies.” While we already published a brief account of this event, it may be of interest for many that the official report of the EarlyMuse working group dedicated to “Sources” has recently become available online: Endangered Musical Sources: Strategies for Safeguarding, Digitization, and International Collaboration.

One central topic of the EarlyMuse discussions of great relevance also for the larger RISM community was the cataloging of musical inventories. Whereas entering data from such historical lists should provide useful insights in the development of historical music collections, complementing the picture gained from other sources, inventories are in several respects different from the music manuscripts and printed editions traditionally cataloged in the RISM database – a difference that should be reflected in the data structure and also be clearly communicated to our users who typically turn to RISM in search of surviving sources (rather than of hints regarding sources that may no longer exist).

The increasing role of students in RISM cataloging emerged as another central thread of the friendly exchanges in Wrocław, since local research projects can often deliver outstanding contributions even without the support of a “national working group” active in the region in question. That said, this model not only presents the Editorial Center with special challenges due to the greater fluctuation of catalogers but also raises the question to what extent a RISM record should directly be associated with the name of its creator. Identifiable “authorship” of such contributions seemed to have marginal relevance to most RISM catalogers from the older generations, socialized in the traditional working groups, but is of potentially greater interest for students for whom these records may primarily be an initial step on their thorny path toward the “publish or perish” world of academic musicology.

Thirdly, the need to facilitate data exchange between RISM and other data pools was highlighted by several participants. As an insightful example the online catalog of Tartini’s works was cited, from which several source descriptions could meaningfully be incorporated in RISM, if an easy way for exchange existed between RISM and the MerMEId software underlying the Tartini catalog.

Needless to say, all these ideas have in the meantime been further discussed by the staff of the RISM Editorial and Digital Centers and we hope to offer our catalogers and users a solution for at least some of them in the near future.

Category: New at RISM