Research on music scores: a national task under international coordination

Abstract

The preservation of ancient music sources is today ensured, in more than 30 countries, by work groups associated to the local RISM, an organization with the object of compiling a comprehensive catalogue of the music sources of the country in question. The RISM head office is at Frankfurt and its particular task is to collect, and store in one central place, the information supplied by the national groups and to publish the results of this collaboration. The principal objective is the compilation of directories of printed music editions (Series A/I) and of music manuscripts (Series A/II). Nine volumes, with related supplements (A-F and G-L), have been produced to date of the A/I series, while it is hoped to publish the remaining supplements and indexes in the near future. In the case of the A/II series, it is planned to computerize the information (approx. 365,000 entries) and to release the acquired data progressively on CD-ROMs. A first step was taken in this direction at the end of 1995 with the issue of a CD-ROM containing approx. 160,000 titles of which more than 20,000 titles were in Italian sources. In order to accelerate and facilitate the editing and loading operations, the RISM headquarters decided to allow the national groups to use its Pikado software, so as to receive the information on floppy disks instead of on paper printouts; in the case of those national groups which have developed their own cataloguing programs, the exchange of information is via data conversion systems.
The publications of Series B (systematic series) are instead the responsibility of experts in the various research fields; in 1995 a new volume in Section B/XII will be added to the 25 already published. Since Series C, on the other hand, is published jointly by RISM and IAML, the revision of the volumes is entrusted to a chief editor who will act in collaboration with the two institutions. At the moment, Elizabeth Davis is editing the second volume (Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Irish Republic, Great Britain, Luxemburg, Norway, Holland, Sweden, Finland) and the third volume (Spain, France, Italy, Portugal).
Other fields of activity of RISM are the publication of individual library catalogues, the documentation of collections of letters of musical interest and the cataloguing of librettos: a subcommittee has recently been set up within the Commission Mixte for the purpose of creating a data bank for librettos.
Information of RISM activities is published in the newsletter Inforism, edited by the Frankfurt headquarters and circulated to the national groups. Information on RISM is also available on Internet on Home Page WWW compiled by United States RISM (http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/loebmusic/isham/rism.html). The facilities included in the WWW page do not concern solely the activity of the United States group, but cover various branches of RISM activity.
The paper ends with two appendixes: the first, a list of the publications edited by RISM and the second, a list of Italian libraries known to RISM headquarters.