News archive – New at RISM
Of Misspelt and Corrected Title Pages
Imagine you are an engraver and have spent hours if not days bent over the plate of a title page that you were asked to make by a music publisher – and then you notice an error. What now? Start over? Leave the error? Or is there some way of...
25 November 2021
André Printed Editions Now Dated to Plate Number 1400
We know that plate and publisher numbers are especially helpful when dating the music editions of many publishers from the 18th and 19th centuries. RISM’s A/I volumes, which documented printed music by a single composer, had very few editions from the Offenbach publisher Johann André that were dated. (One of...
25 October 2021
Martorell Collection of Opera Scores Now Online from the Library of Congress
We have received the following from Karen Lund (Library of Congress): The Music Division of the Library of Congress is happy to announce the launch of a new digital collection, the “Martorell Collection,” at: https://www.loc.gov/collections/martorell-collection/ The largest subset of the “Martorell Collection” includes 253 uniformly-bound volumes comprising well over 1,100...
21 October 2021
ICCU and RISM: An Immense Number of Records
RISM has now added over 60,000 records from the Italian union catalog, ICCU. The Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche (ICCU) received its current name in 1975 after the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali was founded. ICCU replaced the...
6 September 2021
Report on a four-week internship at the RISM Editorial Center in October 2020
The following is a report from our former intern, Daniel Kneer: In October 2020, I completed a four-week internship in the RISM Editorial Center, Frankfurt am Main, as part of my BA in musicology. Due to my background in information technology and my musicological interest in archiving and digitization, I...
12 August 2021
Botanists in RISM
The connection between botany and music may not be all that obvious, but in our database you can find over forty botanists, mostly men and one woman. Most of our botanists wrote words that were set to music and they do not have any direct link to the music itself....
9 August 2021
The New Online Directory of RISM Library Sigla
With the launch of the new RISM website last December, we took the opportunity to offer a new and improved Online Directory of RISM Library Sigla. The new directory is updated continuously and is the most complete and up-to-date source of RISM sigla. Currently, there are 8,500 institutions in the...
17 June 2021
Plaine & Easie Tutorial Now Available
We are pleased to announce a new tutorial from the RISM Editorial Center in cooperation with the U.S. RISM Office at Harvard University. This tutorial focuses on entering music incipits in RISM’s cataloguing program, Muscat, using the Plaine & Easie Code. The Plaine & Easie Code is a library standard...
10 June 2021
How Small Changes Can Cause Great Confusion
In the course of revising catalog entries for printed anthologies to 1700, we always encounter more complex cases. John Playford’s The Musical Companion, which was published in 1672 and 1673 and is the topic of this post, is a prime example for many reasons. In the printed B/I volume (François...
27 May 2021
My Internship at RISM: A New Cataloging Experience
We share with you the following report from Deanna Pellerano, a Master of Library Science (music specialization) and Master of Musicology candidate at Indiana University: When I learned that RISM offered an internship at its Editorial Center, I knew immediately that this would be an excellent internship for me. At...
25 May 2021
