About the project
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - International Inventory of Musical Sources - is an international, non-profit organization that aims to comprehensively document extant musical sources worldwide: manuscripts, printed music editions, writings on music theory, and libretti that are found in libraries, archives, churches, schools, and private collections. RISM’s over 1.5 million records can be searched at no cost through the RISM. RISM was founded in Paris in 1952 and is the largest and only global organization that documents written musical sources.
For over 70 years now, two German offices in Dresden and Munich have been working as part of more than 35 country groups worldwide to record sources that are important for music research. The cataloguing of music manuscripts of polyphonic music from around 1600 to the mid-19th century is the focus of the work of both German research centres.
The music sources relevant to RISM are mainly located in public and church archives and libraries. RISM staff determine the locations, examine the music sources preserved there and describe the source material in accordance with international guidelines. As a rule, all bibliographic information is taken from the original documents, which requires physical access to the collections. In the course of working on the various collections, additional checks are made to see whether there are any other sources that were not included in previous cataloguing of printed sources, in order to include them in the RISM Catalog as well.
Since June 2010, the database has been freely accessible via Internet as RISM Catalog. Over the decades, the data underwent several steps on its way to digitisation: some holdings had been published in book form before the first electronic edition appeared and were gradually transferred to an electronic RISM database. The catalogue entries, which were initially created on index cards, were also transferred to the computer. Until 2008, the results were published on an annual CD-ROM; finally, the transition to the current online catalogue took place. In addition, individual catalogues were also published for selected collections.