Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
Industry Indexing and abstracting service
Founded 1966
Founder Barry S. Brook
Headquarters City University of New York
New York City, New York, United States
Key people
 Barbara Mackenzie, Editor-in-Chief
Zdravko Blažeković, Executive Editor
Products RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
Number of employees
 42
Website www.rilm.org

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (International Repertory of Music Literature; Internationales Repertorium der Musikliteratur), commonly known by its acronym RILM, is an organisation which seeks to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of musicology in all countries and languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. For anyone with an interest in learning about any type of, or any aspect of, music, RILM offers tools for locating research on all topics related to the discipline.[1] RILM is incorporated in the state of New York as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation.

Central to RILM’s work and mission is the international bibliography of scholarship relating to all facets of music. RILM covers significant scholarship in both printed and digital media, and in any language. It consists of citations of articles, books, bibliographies, catalogues, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, Festschriften, films, videos, technical drawings of instruments, facsimile editions, iconographies, commentaries included with critical editions of music, ethnographic recordings, conference proceedings, and reviews. Each entry provides the title in the original language, an English translation of the title, full bibliographic data, and an abstract with a keyword index. Many of the non-English entries also include an abstract in the language of the publication. RILM is currently growing at the rate of over 50,000 listings each year.

History

RILM was founded in 1966 by the American musicologist Barry S. Brook (1918–1997) under the joint sponsorship of the International Musicological Society (IMS) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML). These organizations have since been joined by the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). At the time of its founding, RILM was the first abstracted bibliography in the humanities and designated by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) as the pilot project for the development of a computerized, bibliographical system in the humanities to serve as a model for the more than 30 constituent scholarly societies of the ACLS.

During 1967 and 1968, RILM has developed its first set of computer programs for the automated processing and sorting of bibliographic records and author/subject indexes. They ran first on the mainframe IBM computer IBM System/360 at the computing center of the City University of New York. The S/360 was delivered by IBM in 1964 and it was at that time the most advance computing machine. The original IBM S/360 software was later migrated to IBM System/370 and used in the production of RILM Abstracts for twenty years, from 1969 to 1988.[2] RILM’s development of procedures for computerized data processing was immediately adopted by RILA (Répertoire International de Littérature d’Art), founded upon RILM’s model, which started publishing abstracts in 1975.

In 1979 RILM made an agreement with Lockheed Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, a division of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, Inc. for the distribution of its data through the telephone lines. Later on, this agreement was transferred to DIALOG Information Retrieval Services. Although available online already before the advent of the Internet, until the end of the twentieth century the primary medium for distribution for its bibliographic records were printed volumes.[3]

From 1993 RILM was no longer available on DIALOG Information Retrieval Service, but in 1989 the National Information Service Corporation (NISC) in Baltimore released RILM Abstracts of Music Literature on CD-ROM. During the 1990s RILM Abstracts became available online through NISC Muse (1993-2010), OCLC First Search (1994-2010), Ovid/SilverPlatter (2002-2010), and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts/ProQuest (2002-2010) platforms. RILM databases are currently exclusively available through EBSCO Information Services.

At the time when RILM was appearing only in print, its subject thesaurus and name equivalencies, which led users to the preferred terms, were translated into seventeen languages and alphabetically integrated with the subject index.[4] This practice allowed users to find the desired English-language term or the spelling of a personal name by initiating the search from the language most familiar to them. Gradually RILM expanded its multilingual environment and the database now includes, besides standard English-language abstracts, also abstracts in the language of publication and in other languages wherever available. In the mid-2000s RILM expanded its coverage of Asian publications, particularly covering the music scholarship published in Chinese periodicals, and decided at that time that all elements of bibliographic records for publications issued in non-roman writing systems should be bilingual.

Organization

RILM has been founded by the International Musicological Society (IMS) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML). Each of these societies appoints four members of Commission Mixte International, RILMs advisory committee. In 2007, the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) joined IMS and IAML as the third sponsoring organization, appointing further four members to the Commission Mixte.

RILM's first editorial office was located at the Queens College, City University of New York (1967–68). The Graduate Center, CUNY provides an institutional context for RILM’s International Center since 1968.

RILM was envision from the beginning as a cooperative of national committees responsible for contributing bibliographic citations and abstracts for the publications issues in their respective countries to the International Office in New York. Records received at the International Office are edited, indexed, and added to the online database. The International Office currently received about 15,000 records per year from RILM's national committees; further 35,000 records per year are produced by editors at the International Office.

Bibliographic information and abstracts—as well as journals that have not yet been covered by RILM—can also be submitted directly to the International Center in New York.

Publications

Online publications

The bibliography exists in a single database, distributed as two products: RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (1967-Present only). The full database presently contains over 860,409 entries for publications in 171 languages and from 174 countries. The earliest entry is of a Festschrift from 1594. RILM was issued in print from 1967 through 1999 and is currently available in a cumulative online database by subscription.

Although available online already before the advent of the Internet, until the end of the twentieth century the primary medium for distribution for its bibliographic records were printed volumes.[5]

RILM also published RILM Retrospectives series, initiated in 1972, which includes printed thematic bibliographies of pre-1967 music literature; the RILM Perspectives series, initiated in 2009, which includes papers presented at conferences sponsored by RILM; and a style manual for writing about music, is in its second edition.

Pending products

This past year, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale announced a joint project to bring the superlative German-language music encyclopedia online.

Separate from MGG, RILM will soon launch the Encyclopedia Full Text Collection with 40 seminal titles comprising over 66,000 pages and featuring entries in English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Greek. The titles span the years 1836 to 2014 and offer the comprehensive coverage of topics across the disciplines of historical musicology and ethnomusicology. The Collection will continuously expand with additional titles that fit the needs of the musicological research community.

See also

Bibliography

  • Brook, Barry S., “Some new paths for music bibliography”, Computers in humanistic research: Readings and perspectives (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967) 204-211
  • Spivacke, Harold, “A new journal of abstracts for musicologists”, Computers and the humanities 2/3 (1968) 120-124
  • Brook, Barry S., “Music literature and modern communication: Some revolutionary potentials of the RILM project”, Acta musicologica 42/3-4 (1970) 205-17; also published in Journal of the Indian Musicological Society II/1 (1971) 9-19.
  • Brook, Barry S., “Musikliteratur und moderne Kommunikation: Zum Projekt RILM”, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 13/1 (1971) 18-20
  • Schiødt, Nanna, “RILM: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale”, Dansk musiktidsskrift 45/4 (1970) 168-173
  • Brook, Barry S., “The road to RILM”, Modern music librarianship: In honor of Ruth Watanabe, ed. by Alfred Mann (Stuyvesant, Pendragon Press; Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1989) 85-94
  • Schuursma, Ann May Briegleb, “Summary report of activities IAML Project Group on Classification and Indexing”, Fontes artis musicae 37/1 (Jan-Mar 1990), 46-48
  • Brook, Barry S., “Music literature and modern communication: Revolutionary potentials of the ACLS/CUNY/RILM project”, College music symposium 40 (2000) 31-41
  • Green, Alan, “The RILM project: Charting the seas of modern musicological literature”, College music symposium 40 (2000), 42-54
  • Jenkins, Martin D., “A descriptive study of subject indexing and abstracting in International index to music periodicals, RILM abstracts of music literature, and The music index online”, Notes: Quarterly journal of the music library association 57/4 (2001), 834-863
  • Blazekovic, Zdravko, RILM Abstracts of music literature in its global environment: The past and vision for the future.

References

  1. ↑ Seaton, Douglass. "On the importance of RILM to the discipline". CMS Forums. Retrieved 28 February 2007.
  2. ↑ The program was developed in Fortran by Solomon D. Gongola, James E. Korenthal, and Jonathan L. Martz, under the supervision of Laurence H. Heimrath. Its documentation was later worked out by Philip J. Drummond and published as Reference Manual for the RILM Automated Bibliographic System, including a User Guide, Reference Information and Program Listings (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature International, 1976), 4 vols.
  3. ↑ RILM Abstracts of Music Literature appeared from 1967 to 1983 in triannual printed volumes with indexes corresponding to annual volumes as well as cumulative indexes corresponding to five-year periods; from 1984 to 1999 in annual volumes with corresponding indexes; and since 2000 it is distributed exclusively online.
  4. ↑ The languages were Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish. Published as RILM Abstracts of Music Literature: International Thesaurus, ed. by Marilyn Bliss (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 1990). The integral thesaurus was also published in the Russian language: Jerzy Gołos, Russian Guide to the RILM International Thesaurus and Cumulative Index/Русский путеводитель по международному тезаурусу РИЛМ и по кумулятивному индексу (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 1976).
  5. ↑ RILM Abstracts of Music Literature appeared from 1967 to 1983 in triannual printed volumes with indexes corresponding to annual volumes as well as cumulative indexes corresponding to five-year periods; from 1984 to 1999 in annual volumes with corresponding indexes; and since 2000 it is distributed exclusively online.
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