New prospects for printed music with RISM.

From the beginning of its activities in the 1950s, the documentation of printed music, alongside music manuscripts and theoretical works, has been an important field of work undertaken by the Repertoire internationale des sources musicales (RISM). Among the very first RISM publications were two volumes of descriptions of music published collectively in anthologies between 1500 and 1800: the Recueils Imprimes XVIe-XVIII Siecles, published as volumes 1 and 2 of RISM Series B in 1960 and 1964 respectively. (2) Musical works printed individually before 1800 were treated mainly in the 1960s and 1970s and appeared in Series A/I in nine main volumes between 1971 and 1981, and in four supplements between 1986 and 1999. (3) In 2011, the content of these volumes was published in CD-ROM format. (4) Meanwhile, many libraries have signaled that additional copies of relevant printed music exist that are not yet indexed in RISM. In our estimation, only ca. 65-70% of the individual editions that appeared between 1600 and 1800 might have been covered by RISM so far. (5) After 1800, not only does the number of editions increase dramatically thanks to new printing techniques, but so does the number of copies per print run. Due to the sheer quantities involved, the work of listing the published output from this later period has been bypassed so far. However, many later music editions have already been described in library catalogs or databases. In addition, quite a few editions have been digitized and are available in resources online. RISM has been working for a while on a revision and expansion of volumes B1 and B2. Facilitating this is an unpublished book manuscript by the late Howard Mayer Brown, a work which the RISM board of directors commissioned and which covered anthologies printed between 1500 and 1550 (i.e., the first half of B1). Largely complete at the time of his death, Brown's manuscript provides detailed contents notes for the material covered with specific titles of works and exact pagination. The manuscript has now been converted to a database and should be integrated into the RISM online catalog, in revised form, in the near future. Revision of the subsequent time period, 1550 to 1600, is also in progress and the data in RISM A/I will follow starting in 2014. When this happens, we will have to consider whether and in what manner the data can be expanded, supplemented, and when necessary corrected. As is generally known, the fundamental difference between manuscripts (RISM Series A/II) and editions is that there is only one copy of a manuscript while there could potentially be numerous copies of an edition from a print run that is substantially the same. In documentation practice (excluding at the moment the peculiarities of collective manuscripts), one record represents one manuscript, and therefore the RISM record is identical to the catalog record in the library. When it comes to printed editions, on the other hand, libraries catalog an edition based in the first instance on the particular copy in their collections (although of course further information about the edition may be obtained from reference sources in many cases). RISM, by contrast, combines information about copies from various libraries into one record, forming a kind of overarching record that aims to document the edition as a whole based on extant holdings. Individual copies are only documented via a RISM library siglum and brief remarks about the extent of the material at hand. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] All of the cards that were used as the foundation of editing Series A/I through to the supplements are still kept at the office of the RISM Zentralredaktion in Frankfurt. The cards, which are from different countries, are arranged by composer and work, and the editions are consolidated to the extent that it was possible to do so. Difficulties arose in that there was little standardization in the way that title pages were transcribed by the participating countries: they were seldom transcribed complete and never in a diplomatic form; the way in which titles were shortened also varied considerably. …