Getting back to the source, virtually: RISM as a tool in the digital environment

Abstract

1 Portions of this article were read in papers given at the conferences »Bringing the Past into the Future: Creating and Curating Digital Music Archives« at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea, October 2016, and the International Musicological Society Congress, Tokyo, Japan, March 2017. I would like to thank the anonymous readers of this journal for their helpful comments. The online catalogue of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) contains over 1,088,000 records for music manuscripts, imprints, librett i, and treatises. Since the release in 2010, RISM has launched several initiatives to bring musicologists closer to the primary source materials they are researching. The online catalogue att empts to expand the database beyond simply recording the locations of musical sources. With the availability of the RISM data as linked open data, RISM is able to collaborate with other projects in the digital humanities and provide data as a basis for research projects. The release of Muscat, RISM’s opensource specialized software for cataloguing musical sources, has made it easier for RISM project participants to catalogue musical sources. This article will describe how the RISM online catalogue brings musicologists closer to primary source materials and how musicologists can work with RISM using Muscat to facilitate and disseminate their own source-based research.