Creating Your Own Catalog Printout from the RISM Database

Monday, May 17, 2021

Musicologists and librarians working on diverse projects frequently approach the Editorial Center to have RISM records gathered and printed as a separate catalog. Such catalogs may be needed for all sorts of reasons: to publish a printed catalog of the holdings of a collection, to provide funding agencies and sponsors with proof that a promised project was successfully completed, or to gain a better overview of the records to potentially correct them. While the production of such a catalog requires some fluency in IT matters, musicologists and librarians who can rely on the help of an IT technician at their home institutions can easily make use of this opportunity to present the results of their work outside of the main RISM online database.

The Editorial Center offers this export option in the hope that an increasing number of institutions and projects will consider adding records directly to the RISM catalog. Records entered using the Muscat cataloging program, which is open source and freely available, become searchable in the RISM Catalog of Musical Sources, which ensures far greater visibility for a musically inclined audience than the local catalogs of most institutions. At the same time, the opportunity to export your records as a separate catalog (in PDF format, which may then of course also be printed) allows all RISM contributors to document the results of their work in a more readily perceptible way, should they be expected to do so.

With these considerations in mind, we have asked our IT manager, Stephan Hirsch, to provide instructions explaining how such PDF catalogs can be extracted from the RISM database. If you find that this tool could prove useful for your daily work or a specific project, please take a closer look, or ask your local IT staff to do so. Please see our Data Services page for more information.

Category: New publications