News archive – New at RISM
First RISM Siglum for Papua New Guinea
Part of our work at RISM includes creating new library sigla for any institution worldwide that holds material related to music research. We regularly receive requests from scholars, archivists, and librarians every month. In the course of our daily work, we also stumble upon institutions for which we have no...
23 March 2020
RISM Central Office Temporarily Closed
As a precautionary measure due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the RISM Central Office in Frankfurt has been closed since 19 March 2020. We are currently working in a limited capacity, so we thank you in advance for your understanding. We continue to be reachable through the usual ways, including...
18 March 2020
Looking Back on 2019
The year 2020 is still young, but let’s take a moment to look back on 2019 at the most popular stories from the world of musical sources that we published here on the RISM blog. May 2020 be as rich with discoveries! New Music Manuscripts from...
16 January 2020
Caught the Catch?
While revising the many anthologies published by John Playford starting around 1650 (titles ranging from Catch that Catch Can and Musicks Recreation to Select Ayres and Dialoges) the entry for B/I 1653|7 (Select Musicall Ayres and Dialogues […] Printed by T[homas] H[arper] for John Playford) stood out because the British...
14 November 2019
New Women Composers in 2019
In March 2017, we published a list with 800 women composers who appear in RISM records. In 2019 alone, we have had over 50 new names, so in total there are over 1,000. As a sampling, here are 17 of them. Some of the new ones are from the records...
4 November 2019
Launch of Project Group on RISM Series C
At the IAML Congress in Kraków this summer, the General Assembly approved the creation of a Project Group on RISM Series C. It will be a pilot project to update the RISM Series C directory of music holding institutions, available online through the Directory of Library Sigla, in collaboration with...
23 September 2019
Welcome, Carmen Álvarez!
We are delighted to welcome Carmen Álvarez to the RISM Central Office as an intern over the next four months. Carmen is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and is writing about the musical holdings preserved in two cathedral archives in Zaragoza (E-Zac). She is...
19 September 2019
The Many Lives of Baron Friedrich von Boyneburgk
We were very pleased to receive this post from Klaus Rettinghaus (Leipzig). The RISM data have since been revised. The changes will be visible after the next update of the RISM catalog. Authority data can be a big help in finding materials related to specific entities, usually individuals. This is...
29 August 2019
New Music Manuscripts from Italy (ICCU) in RISM
After several years of discussions and negotiations with the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo unico delle Biblioteche Italiane (ICCU) and an intensive technical preparatory phase, more than 200,000 records of music manuscripts from the SBN Musica database were transferred to the internal RISM database at the beginning of 2019. The...
8 August 2019
New RISM Cataloging Tools for Librarians
We are delighted to announce that there are some new cataloging tools available that will help improve the presence of RISM in local library catalogs. You can find these new resources in the Cataloging Tools section of the RISM for Libraries page. Among the new tools is a link to...
1 July 2019
