Card indexes of music prints from the RISM offices in Munich and Dresden digitised

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

The two German offices of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales in Dresden and Munich hold extensive card indexes from the first decades of their activities. The card index of series A/I (“Music prints before 1800”) documents the data collected on music prints owned by institutions in Germany during the recording period from 1953 to 2005. The cards contain complete titles, locations and signatures. Since the data was initially only transferred in abbreviated form to the RISM Catalog and not all entries have been fully catalogued to date, the detailed title cards often contain additional content to complete the data.

For research data backup purposes, the catalogue of music prints from the Dresden office, comprising around 24,400 title cards, was therefore digitised at the end of 2023 and is now available for use via the Digital Collections of the SLUB. Subsequently, links were also created between the digitised title cards and the record sets in the RISM database, so that the digitised title cards can be accessed directly from the RISM catalogues (RISM-OPAC and RISM-online).

This year, a total of just over 54,000 title cards were also digitised in Munich and made available in the digital collections, see Munich Digitisation Centre. The alphabetical sorting by composer is followed by that of anonymous authors and collections. This means that the entire card indexes for the music prints in series A/I are now available in digital form, and a significant step towards securing the research data of the Germany working group has been completed.

The title cards of the two catalogues were created over a period of more than 50 years (approx. 1953-2005). Occasionally, information on the location of the items is no longer up to date, but changes in location can be determined via the RISM Sigel Directory.

Category: New at RISM