Annual Report 2025
Thursday, March 5, 2026
Approaching the closure of a decades-long project for which the RISM Editorial Center received support from the German Akademienprogramm, throughout the year 2025 we were busy clarifying how the core services earlier offered by the Editorial Center (better known as RISM Zentralredaktion) could be ensured in the future. While in this regard we received fruitful feedback also from the international RISM community, among others at the copiously attended “RISM Together” session of the 2025 IAML congress, the most pragmatic discussions involved the state libraries of Munich, Dresden and Berlin, as well as the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, as part of a planning project generously financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The last details of how all essential editorial duties could be continued, are finalized in these months, but we are already well in the process of transferring knowledge from the Zentralredaktion to the partner libraries, so that the inevitable fading out of the former (thanks to a very last Auslauffinanzierung for the long-term project, now planned only for the summer of 2026) would present the least possible disturbance for the vast international community regularly relying on RISM’s services.
With these imminent changes in mind, it is little wonder that (in comparison to the profusion of some earlier years) the RISM database could only expand at a moderate pace: we currently offer slightly over 1,347,000 manuscript descriptions for research (i.e., about 30,000 more than at the beginning of last year), even though by adding also the printed editions we arrive at an impressive total of over 1.6 million source records. It is also worth noting that the increase in manuscript descriptions strongly depended on the consistently outstanding productivity of the German RISM working group – which, however, is now also in its final ‘run-down’ project phase, and is expected to deliver significantly fewer records in the future. Thus, in the coming years it remains a central concern for RISM to intensify its coverage in countries where cataloguing could only get started recently (as with the project in partnership with the Ukraine Art Aid Center, aimed at cataloging Ukraine’s endangered musical treasures) and in regions where RISM is just about to take its first steps (a case in point being Peru, from where the first manuscript descriptions were entered in our database in the fall of 2025).
Notwithstanding all the challenges affecting RISM’s editorial side and the future growth of our database, in these years we are fortunate to be able to rely also on our younger international anchor, the RISM Digital Center in Bern. Financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation to develop and maintain RISM as an open-ended research infrastructure, the Bern team does not simply provide technical support for the work of the Editorial Center, but contributes many ideas of its own, providing an additional impetus that several new features of our cataloging software Muscat amply testify for as well.
Overall, while the imminent closure of the Zentralredaktion inevitably marks the end of an era in which Frankfurt served as the hub of the RISM universe, so to speak, attendees of our annual reporting session at the Salzburg IAML congress no doubt left with the impression that, rather than phasing out, RISM has recently undergone a crucial phase of revitalization. Some of the new features presented there – from the RISM-specific work authorities through the updated version of the RISM Catalog and the latest developments in RISM Online – testified for the ever more intensive development of the technical infrastructure, while others – like the publication of RISM’s cataloging guidelines on our public website (at the moment in two languages: English and German) or the systematic revision of our institution authorities in cooperation with IAML’s national branches – also exemplified how RISM has recently moved toward more inclusivity and cooperation, a tendency that should certainly be further intensified in the future.
It is also worth mentioning that the user statistics of the RISM Catalog, which have been monitored for many years, seem to show no signs of declining – even though the same data can in the meantime be accessed through RISM Online as well. Meanwhile, there is also steady international interest in cataloging new sources for the RISM database: in our workshops offered on the side of the annual IAML congress (both in person and online) an impressively diverse group of participants from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States got a first introduction to RISM’s cataloging principles.
In conclusion it should be mentioned that, while nowadays most of our patrons use RISM through the internet, in 2025 our series of printed catalogs could be expanded by yet another seminal volume: Les mélodies de l’hymnaire médiéval – IXe–XVIe siècles – France, edited by Christian Meyer and published by Henle Verlag in Munich (RISM Series B/XIX,1).
The entire 2025 annual report of the RISM Editorial Center can be found on the RISM website.
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