Annual Report 2024

Thursday, March 20, 2025

At the time of delivering this report, RISM is in the middle of a two-year phase of transition. While in 2024–25 the Editorial Center in Frankfurt am Main is still financed under the auspices of the German Akademienprogramm, it is now operating on a reduced budget and must intensively be preparing for an inevitable ‘changing of the guards’ in 2026. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), a special project has been launched to foster discussions with the State Libraries in Berlin, Dresden and Munich, as well as the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, to establish a sustainable new structure that could take over the core duties of the Editorial Center. While time is now relatively short, we are hopeful that an optimal solution can be found by the end of this year, and in the course of 2026 the indispensable knowledge transfer can also take place to ensure that users of RISM’s services should take little if any notice of the structural changes occurring in the background.

Given these circumstances, it comes as little surprise that the impressive statistical figures of the previous years could not be repeated. Currently, the RISM database includes slightly over 1,320,000 manuscript descriptions – about 30,000 more than at the beginning of 2024, primarily reflecting the consistently outstanding productivity of the German working group. Researchers’ interest in our data, however, kept growing: in 2024 the RISM Catalog was visited by more than 160.000 people with close to 1,127,000 visits and ca. 27 million page views – whereby our database is now also searchable through RISM Online and as part of an EBSCO subscription package.

In this period of restructuring on RISM’s editorial side, it is fortunate that since 2021 RISM has also had a Digital Center, which essentially grew out of the Swiss RISM working group. The cooperation between the two Centers could not be closer: besides the regular video calls, lesser and greater issues and questions are clarified right away in chat messages and emails, all of which results in an ever more intensive and user-oriented development of the Muscat cataloging application. At the same time, somewhat more behind the scenes, the two centers join forces to improve the quality of legacy data by trying to identify inconsistencies, correct existing records, and – optimally – introduce validations that should prevent catalogers from committing the same mistakes in their new entries. A case in point is the over two million music incipits, the analysis and gradual correction of which has also prepared the ground for a substantial revision of the Plaine & Easie system used for their encoding. This work (still in progress) was first presented at the 2024 IAML congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa – an event that also gave RISM the opportunity for the first direct contact with several institutions on the African continent.

It is also worth mentioning that, throughout 2024, we managed further to intensify our communication with the larger RISM community. Expanding on our tradition of “Muscat Coffee Hours,” which allow for informal discussions between the users of our cataloging program Muscat and its developers, the RISM Coordinating Committee had initiated a “Muscat RISM Newsletter,” of which two issues were distributed in 2024. Building on our proposal made at the 2023 IAML congress in Cambridge, the Editorial Center also published calls encouraging RISM working groups and IAML national branches around the globe to actively participate in revising the institution authorities of their respective countries. Finally, we also made the RISM cataloguing guidelines, which had until now been accessible only inside our cataloging environment, available to all visitors of the RISM website to make our work more visible and share the experience gathered at RISM over several decades with the larger professional community. Through all these steps, RISM seeks further to open its gates and thereby hopes to play in the long run (once the above-mentioned restructuring has been completed) an even more central role in the field of musical source studies.

An important aspect of these future perspectives is to analyze the RISM data in more depth to increase its (re)usability in other contexts and to connect it with other data sets – all concerns for the Digital Center in particular. The Bern team has already taken many steps in this direction, among others by further developing RISM Online with its linked data potential in mind, by reviewing and optimizing the RISM references in Wikidata, or by exploring how the combined search also retrieving records from DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) could be extended to allow for the inclusion of further outside datasets.

The entire 2024 annual report can be found on the RISM website.

Category: New publications