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Category Archives: RILM
RILM to publish DEUMM Online!
RILM has acquired the full rights to the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (DEUMM), published between 1983 and 2005 by the renowned Italian publisher of reference works UTET Grandi Opere under the editorship of Alberto Basso. With its three thematic sections (Le biografie; Il lessico; and I titoli e i personaggi) containing some 35,000 entries, DEUMM is the most important modern music dictionary in the Italian language.
The content of the original printed edition, along with some updated and new entries, will be the starting point for DEUMM Online, to be offered as one of RILM’s suite of reference works. RILM plans to launch DEUMM Online in winter 2023 on RILM’s platform Egret, which offers advanced search and browse capabilities. DEUMM Online will be an essential electronic resource for music scholarship world-wide.
The founding editor of DEUMM, Dr. Alberto Basso, said “I feel particularly honored and therefore happy to have been included among the initiatives that RILM is proposing to the world in the context of scholarship and musical history. The fact that DEUMM has been taken into consideration satisfies me in a particular way and certainly would have satisfied the management of the former UTET that is unfortunately no longer present on the market. I hope that the work I have done creating DEUMM some forty years ago will continue and that DEUMM will be updated.” (The original interview with Dr. Basso may be heard below.)
Répertoire international de la littérature de l’art (RILA)
Plans for the publication of a bibliography of writings concerning art history were announced in the summer of 1974. The project’s vision was born much earlier, in large part influenced by the publication of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature in early 1967.
RILA (Répertoire International de la Littérature de l’Art) borrowed the model for its name from RILM, as well as the concept of international cooperation first proposed at the conference held in Paris under the auspices of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1969 and then confirmed in Washington, D.C., under the sponsorship of the College Art Association of America in October 1971. RILA was conceived to provide substantial abstracts and detailed subject indexes of art-historical scholarship concerning post-classical European art and post-conquest American art published in periodicals, books, Festschriften, congress reports, exhibition and museum catalogues, and dissertations.
The project took off in 1973 as the bibliographic pilot project of the American Council of Learned Societies, with the RILM office at the CUNY Graduate Center initially providing editorial and technological support. RILA was intended to be the first addition to a proposed interdisciplinary group of bibliographies in the humanities, initiated with RILM. In the Demonstration issue (above) , which tested RILM’s bibliographic models applied to art-historical literature, the editor Michael Rinehart wrote “Continued regular publication of RILA will depend on response to this issue, and particularly on two factors essential to its long-range success: the willingness of authors to contribute abstracts of their work, and the extension of international participation through a free exchange of materials among existing and future organizations and publications.”
RILA was initially produced with RILM’s computer program, which ran on the IBM mainframe computer System 360 at the computing center of The City University of New York—the most advanced computing machine at the time. RILM’s founder Barry S. Brook was among the key advisors on the project, and the format of the bibliographic entries, the classification schema, and the indexing practices in RILA echoed those in the printed volumes of RILM. In this form RILA (ISSN: 0145-5982) was published by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute from 1975 through 1989, when it merged with Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA).
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Filed under From the archives, RILM, Visual art
RILM and the IBM Selectric
Although the production of RILM Abstracts has always heavily relied on computing technology, the computers of the 1960s and 1970s were not able to support the complexities of its multilingual and multicultural mission. Even the most powerful IBM mainframe System/370, used in the production of RILM Abstracts from 1970 to 1988, had limited possibilities for rendering different fonts, writing systems, and diacritical signs. For RILM, displaying names and terms in their most accurate representations—including rendering them in their original writing systems—was an imperative since its inception in 1967.
RILM’s Soviet national committee, headed in the 1960s and 1970s by Grigorij Mihajlovič Šneerson (1901–82) and Ûrij Vsevolodovič Keldyš (1907–95), was prolific, contributing a large number of records for publications issued in the Russian language. As the S/370 was unable to render their authors and titles in Russian Cyrillic, early RILM editors used another, much simpler IBM machine: the Selectric typewriter. The Selectric’s changeable typeball made possible it to render different fonts and scripts. For RILM editors it was like an automated transliteration machine, since its typeball with Cyrillic letters enabled printing Russian texts by typing on a standard roman-letter keyboard.
IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter on 31 July 1961, 60 years ago today!
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Filed under From the archives, RILM
RILM Collaborates with The Smithsonian Institution
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) is excited to announce its collaboration with Smithsonian Music for its 2019 Year of Music. This initiative aims to increase public engagement, advance understanding, and connect communities by highlighting and sharing the Smithsonian’s vast musical holdings. RILM, which documents and disseminates music research worldwide, supports this by drawing on its comprehensive digital resources to create blog posts, right here on Bibliolore, on a selection of the Year of Music’s Objects of the Day. Each post is enhanced with an expertly curated bibliography.
The bibliographic references stem from one of the richest and most exhaustive resources of global music research, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text™, which contains over a million bibliographic records from relevant writings on music published from the early 19th century to the present in 178 countries and in 143 languages.
Published posts include ones on Grand Wizzard Theodore’s turntables, the newly acquired Stinson banjo, Patsy Cline’s performance outfit, the cover for the Voyager Golden Record, and Elaine Brown’s Seize the Time, with many more to come.
To access all our posts in this Smithsonian collaboration series, search for “Smithsonian Object of the Day,” or click on the tag below.
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Filed under Musicology, Publication types, RILM, RILM news
RILM’s India connection
In May 2019 RILM entered into a collaboration with the Archives & Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Gurgaon, India. Dr. Shuba Chaudhuri, ARCE’s Director, put us in touch with Sagnik Atarthi, who is now working there to send us bibliographic information for publications on Indian music and dance in ARCE’s extensive library.
Dr. Atarthi has already added over 1000 new records into our database—records for publications that are otherwise unavailable to us. He is able to work fluently in his native Bengali, as well as in Hindi and English, and we look forward to our continuing association with him!
Above, Dr. Zdravko Blažeković, RILM’s Executive Editor, and Dr. Shubha Chaudhuri, Director of the Archives & Research Center for Ethnomusicology; below, a brief documentary about ARCE.
Bibliolore turns 10!
by Jim Cowdery, Senior Editor, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
Sometime in the summer of 2009, Zdravko Blažeković, RILM’s Executive Editor, casually said to me “You know, we should have a blog.” He was thinking about how simply by virtue of what we do, RILM editors have a unique perspective on music literature, and how others might enjoy our insights along with us.
I agreed, and started looking into how we might make that happen. We weren’t sure exactly how our blog would turn out, but we decided to start with some news about RILM. Our first blog post was published ten years ago this week!
Today Bibliolore includes subjects of practical interest to music researchers and librarians and writings on music that have piqued our curiosity or made us smile, along with original contributions from our team of musicologists. Most posts have direct relationships to content found in RILM’s resources, which include our flagship RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and its enhancement, RILM Abstracts with Full Text, as well as RILM Music Encyclopedias, MGG Online, and Index to Printed Music.
Below, we celebrate our first ten years with Ten Years After’s performance at Woodstock, 50 years ago!
Filed under RILM, RILM news, Uncategorized
RILM in the news, 1967
On Sunday 5 November 1967 The New York times published “Who’s writing about music and where”, a review of the first quarterly volume of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. The volume had been published in August of that year.
The reviewer, Raymond Ericson, noted that the volume “looks, hopefully, like the first permanent attempt to describe regularly what is being written about in the world’s significant literature on music” and that it “obviously fills a great need in musicological circles.” He also included summaries of six of the volume’s 497 entries.
Below, something else that happened a couple of days later.
Filed under From the archives, RILM