REPERTOIRE INTERNATIONAL DES SOURCES MUSICALES (RISM)
Zentralredaktion Frankfurt
Annual Report, 2024
Foundation: Internationales Quellenlexikon der Musik e.V., Frankfurt am Main.
Honorary Presidents: Dr. Harald Heckmann (†), Ruppertshain; Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christoph Wolff, Cambridge/Freiburg; President: Prof. Dr. Klaus Pietschmann, Mainz; Vice President: Prof. Dr. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl, Salzburg; Secretary: PD Dr. Laurent Pugin, Bern; Treasurer: Jane Gottlieb, New York; co-opted members of the board: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Konrad, Würzburg; Prof. Dr. John H. Roberts, Berkeley. Commission Mixte (delegates of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres and the International Musicological Society): Prof. Dr. Rebekah Ahrendt (IMS); Mathias Auclair (IAML); Prof. Dr. Drew Edward Davies (IMS); Prof. Dr. Dinko Fabris (IMS); Prof. Dr. Markus Grassl (IMS); Prof. Dr. Beatriz Magalhães Castro (IAML); Dr. Rupert Ridgewell (IAML); Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmidt (IMS); Prof. Dr. Barbara Wiermann (IAML); Sonia Wronkowska (IAML). Director of the Zentralredaktion: Dr. Balázs Mikusi.
Project leader: Prof. Dr. Klaus Pietschmann, Mainz.
Address: RISM Zentralredaktion, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Campus Bockenheim, Bockenheimer Landstraße 133, D-60325 Frankfurt am Main. Telephone: +49 69 706231, fax: +49 69 706026, email: contact@rism.info, website: https://rism.info.
Publishers: Series A/I, Series B volumes VIII,1–2, and Series C: Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel; Series A/II, Internet subscription database: EBSCO Publishing, Inc., Birmingham, AL, USA; Series B (except for volumes VIII,1–2): G. Henle Verlag, Munich.
Web and server hosting: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich and Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (databases); RISM Digital Center, Bern (website).
Personnel – core staff: Dr. Martina Falletta (75%), Stephan Hirsch, Guido Kraus, Alexander Marxen (75%), Dr. Balázs Mikusi, Jennifer Ward.
The International Inventory of Musical Sources (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales – RISM), with its Zentralredaktion (Editorial Center) in Frankfurt, is under the patronage of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) as well as the International Musicological Society (IMS) and is responsible for documenting printed and manuscript transmissions of music worldwide. According to the original concept, Series A/I indexed printed music published by a single composer between 1600 and 1800, while series A/II registered music manuscripts after 1600, with extensive descriptions, including their locations. Series B is designed to cover specific repertories, such as printed anthologies from the 16th to 18th centuries, source literature on music theory in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian, etc. Series A/I and A/II are still enriched today, whereby catalogers no longer need strictly to observe the original chronological boundaries. Volumes of the Series B appear now only sporadically (depending on the submission of appropriate manuscripts), and the source catalog proper has long been complemented by a Series C, the Directory of Music Research Libraries.
Series A/I: Originally issued in nine main volumes, four supplementary volumes, and one index. In 2011 a CD-ROM was released containing all of the entries from the printed volumes, since 2015 these entries have also been available online in the RISM Catalog (and since 2022 also in RISM Online). Given that some national groups regularly submit corrections and additions to their earlier records, the data available online increasingly diverge from the original book publication. Since 2018 catalogers have also been able to rely on specific templates for printed music editions, which were developed in cooperation with the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) in Dresden, and allow for a more nuanced description of printed sources.
Series B: Thirty-four volumes in this series have been published so far. Revised entries from volume B/I, for collections published between 1500 and 1550, were added to the RISM catalog as early as 2015. As part of a multi-year project (relying predominantly on third-party funding), additional B/I entries (pertaining to printed anthologies up to 1700) could be updated and expanded. Thanks to these efforts, by now all B/I entries appear in the RISM database in fully revised and searchable form.
Series C: Five volumes have appeared to date, the last of which were published together with the IAML Publications Committee as revised versions of volumes II and III,1. Apart from this, the RISM Editorial Center issued the special volume RISM Bibliothekssigel-Gesamtverzeichnis (RISM Library Sigla, Complete Index), which has since been made available through RISM’s website as a searchable database of the library sigla. The database also contains contact information such as mailing address, website link, and email address. In 2019, IAML established a successor to the project group Access to Music Archives (AMA) to revise Series C, and the project team – in close cooperation with the Editorial Center – proposed several adjustments to optimize RISM’s Muscat cataloging application and better align it with recent initiatives and bibliographic data models. After evaluating the group’s 2022 final report, in August 2023 the Editorial Center launched an initiative at the annual IAML congress, which aims at revising RISM’s institution authorities in cooperation with IAML’s national branches. Seeking to lend the initiative further momentum, this year we also published official calls for cooperation in two professional journals.
Series A/II: In this series, manuscripts containing polyphonic music written after 1600 are thoroughly described and cataloged. Series A/II is the most comprehensive endeavor that3RISM has undertaken, and is its main focus at present. Contributors from more than 35 countries around the world document music manuscripts in their home libraries and archives. The national working groups use computers to prepare their descriptions, and the majority relies on the Muscat software, developed expressly for this purpose, and provided to our contributors free of charge. This way the information entered is directly registered on RISM’s servers, making the further editorial curation of the data considerably simpler.
From December 2023 to November 2024, the following groups created new records with Muscat: Andorra: 2 records; Argentina: 3 records; Australia: 3 records; Austria: 2,337 records; Bolivia: 215 records; China (Hongkong): 22 records; China (Shanghai): 21 records; Croatia: 180 records; Czech Republic: 2,053 records; Ecuador: 3 records; Germany: 20,206 records; Hungary: 938 records; Italy: 787 records; Lithuania: 2 records; Poland: 1,829 records; Portugal: 1 record; Slovakia: 611 records; Spain: 2,261 records; Switzerland: 1,136 records; United Kingdom and Ireland: 4,596 records; USA: 298 records. The Editorial Center also created a total of 3,295 records, while participants of the project “Mapping the Musical Landscape of the Sixteenth Century” added 1,234 records to the central database.
Many working groups also revise older records. Besides, the Editorial Center receives numerous additions and notifications of mistakes and composer attributions from users, which are incorporated into the records in consultation with the working groups. Some libraries have also sent the Zentralredaktion lists with links to digital objects; these can be copied into the data, in most cases automatically. While the ongoing updating of the database requires much time and attention, it is essential in making the RISM database even more attractive not only to musicologists but also to performing musicians seeking to expand their repertory.
The year 2024 was the first one in a two-year extension period granted to the Editorial Center by the Scientific Commission of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities to align the end of its funding with that of the “RISM (German Sources)” project. One of the special tasks set for this last phase is to develop a sustainable strategy for the continuation of the core duties of the Zentralredaktion – a mission that has been pursued intensively in close cooperation with the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and RISM’s partner libraries in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. Unfortunately, the adjustment of the end date of our support under the auspices of the Akademienprogramm was associated with a significant reduction of its financial volume, therefore several processes needed to be streamlined and certain activities, in particular the series of imports from library catalogs of major international collections, had to be discontinued altogether.
After publishing the data for series A/II on microfiche in the 1980s and annually on CD-ROM beginning in 1994, we have also offered it free of charge in the RISM database since 2010. The development of the software for searching was made possible through collaboration between RISM, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (BSB) and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz. In the meantime the catalog has been enhanced in several steps, thanks to the support received in the context of the FID (Fachinformationsdienst) program of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
In December 2024 the entire data pool in the catalog consists of 157,402 authority records for personal names, as well as 27,151 for institutions. A total of 1,563,159 records remain for descriptions of musical sources, which can be further differentiated into 1,316,702 records for manuscript descriptions and 246,457 for printed editions.
Thanks to these additions to the dataset, both musicologists and performing musicians consider RISM as an indispensable tool and view it as the “first stop” when searching for historical music sources anywhere in the world. This prominent status is also reflected in the intensive use: on average, the RISM Catalog was visited by about 13,349 people per month over 93,915 visits (annually: 160,182 people with 1,126,977 visits and 27 million page views). Furthermore, an increasing number of users run their searches through RISM Online, while EBSCO Publishing, Inc. offers the data as a subscription package with our partner projects RILM and RIPM (see www.r-musicprojects.org).
Since 2013, the data in the RISM Catalog of Musical Sources have been available as open data and as linked open data since 2014. This service is directed at libraries that wish to import their records into local catalogs, or musicological projects that want to make a catalog of sources that covers a specific topic as a basis for further research. The Editorial Center has developed tools to simplify the data delivery process, such as an SRU interface that is intensively used by our diverse partners. The website of the RISM Catalog and the API (Application Programming Interface) of RISM Online also allow for the download of the data, which has been admitted into re3data (a global register including repositories of research data of diverse academic disciplines) partly in EROMM (European Register of Microform and Digital Masters). External partners primarily download the data related to music incipits and instruments, whereby RISM expects such users to report corrections and additions the Editorial Center, thereby improving the overall data quality.
The cataloging software Muscat, introduced in 2016 and based on open-source software (see http://muscat-project.org, is primarily developed by the RISM Digital Center in Bern in cooperation with the Editorial Center: currently version 10.0 is available. As part of a project financed by the Digital Center, in 2024 the work level was fundamentally redesigned – a development the first results of which will presumably be made available in the second half of 2025. This intensive cooperation with the Swiss team helps us in guaranteeing the optimal technical and professional support of RISM working groups around the globe, which the Editorial Center considers a fundamental priority.
The connections with Muscat users are becoming ever more intensive. Our virtual “Muscat Coffee Hours” as a rule take place after a major release and – besides an introduction to the most recent features – allow for free discussion between the developers and the users of the software. Furthermore, since 2024 (as a result of a cooperation with the RISM Coordinating Committee) a “Muscat RISM Newsletter” is being distributed to all Muscat users, calling their attention to RISM-related news and reports of members of the Committee. Finally, since late 2024 the RISM cataloguing guidelines – which have long been held in great esteem by the professional community, but have only been available to Muscat users in the cataloging environment – have been available on a dedicated website: https://guidelines.rism.info
As center of a broad international network, the RISM Editorial Center is deeply invested in convincing ever more libraries, research projects or even individual scholars about the vast advantages of Muscat. Accordingly, in 2024 Muscat-based cataloging project were launched, among others, in the barely studied “country record offices” of the United Kingdom, or the national libraries of Bolivia and Spain, which not only imply a significant enrichment of the RISM database, but are also of significance as potential sources of inspiration for similar initiatives in other countries. Nevertheless, the focus of our outreach activities remains the annual congress of IAML, which was held in Stellenbosch (South Africa) this year, and allowed for the first contacts with institutional partners on the African continent. An important step which – complemented by the series of tutorials available through RISM’s YouTube channel – will hopefully soon lead to the cataloging of the first sources from Africa, and thereby to a further expansion of RISM’s international network.
RISM not only maintains a website offering news items related to musical sources on a weekly basis, but is also very active in the social media: our Facebook page has close to 5,200 fans, and on X (formerly Twitter) we also have almost 2,700 followers.
December 2024
Balázs Mikusi
