The 2017 Annual Report

Monday, February 26, 2018

The annual report for the RISM Central Office has been published on our website. Here are some of the highlights:

Total records: Thanks to the hard work of our international contributors, the RISM online catalog currently has 1,090,000 records.

Contributions from national groups: The following national groups created new records in Muscat, RISM’s cataloging program, totaling over 31,000 new records: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, and the United States.

Plans to import data: RISM continues to work with RISM France, ICCU (Italy), and the Moravian Music Foundation (US) to transfer records for musical sources to the RISM database. This year, an agreement was reached with the Seminario de Música en la nueva España y el México independiente at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). RISM will receive descriptions of the historical music collections from the Mexico City Cathedral.

Catalog users: On average, the online catalog was visited by about 8,400 people per month over 19,830 visits (annually: 101,200 people with 238,000 page views). The catalog is made possible thanks to a partnership between the RISM Central Office, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. A new release of the online catalog is planned for the beginning of 2018.

Links to digitized music: In the online catalog, you can get direct access to images of the sources through links to digitized music: either limit before your search (Advanced search –> Limit search –> Digitized music ) or filter your results (Narrow results –> Digitized music ). There are currently ca. 40,000 such links available.

Muscat: The new cataloging program Muscat, which was released in November 2016, is a platform-independent, web-based, open-source program. As such, it can be adapted to the needs of other projects so that the reuse of RISM data for scholarly projects can be made considerably easier. Concrete projects will try this out next year. Within its first year, it has been running to the full satisfaction of its users. At the same time, it is continuously being developed, leading to new, smaller releases nearly every month.

Social media: RISM has over 2,300 fans on Facebook and 1,700 followers on Twitter.

Articles mentioning RISM: The RISM project continues to be presented, referenced, and described in publications, including newspapers, scholarly journals, and research articles. Please look at the up-to-date bibliography here.

And, as always:

• Corrections welcome: The Zentralredaktion regularly receives suggestions and corrections from users. If you find something that should be corrected, please let us know by sending us your feedback and corrections.

• External databases welcome: RISM is interested in further partnerships with institutions and projects to import data, such as library OPACs or critical editions.

• Open data and linked open data: RISM data can be downloaded directly from the online catalog and reused under a CC-BY license. Libraries can therefore import records for their holdings into local catalogs. The Zentralredaktion has developed tools to simplify the data delivery process, including an SRU interface. RISM data have been reused in the local catalogs of the Bibliotheksservicezentrum (Library Service Centre) in Konstanz, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the SLUB Dresden, the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, and the Moravian Music Foundation.

Here’s to a successful and productive 2018!

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Category: New publications

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