RILM’s YouTube channel is a valuable resource for music researchers, providing expert guidance on navigating its global bibliography, music encyclopedias, and research tools. The channel features tutorials, webinars, and step-by-step demonstrations covering core resources such as RILM Abstracts with Full Text, MGG Online, the RILM Archive of Printed Music Magazines (RAPMM), DEUMM Online, and RILM Music Encyclopedias, along with short videos highlighting key features, including effective search strategies and viewing tools. Besides research instruction, the channel also showcases videos on events, interviews, product launches, and institutional updates. Whether you’re exploring a particular musical genre, topic, or region or simply looking to strengthen your research skills, RILM’s YouTube channel offers practical support to help you get the most from its resources.
The playlists tab makes it easy to browse videos organized by resource, topic, or methodology, allowing you to quickly find content relevant to your interests. New videos are added regularly, so be sure to check back often for the latest updates.
Below are some of the RILM channel’s most popular videos:
With the development of Egret, RILM expanded its role to become a comprehensive service provider in music research and publishing. Egret serves as RILM’s advanced platform for hosting, editing, and distributing full-text music reference works, offering a range of innovative tools designed to improve accessibility and usability for researchers worldwide. Among its key features is a bilingual English and German interface, along with integrated Google Translate functionality that enables instant translation into more than 100 languages. The platform also includes visual search capabilities, such as the MGG Online Timeline, helping users explore content in an intuitive and interactive way.
Egret also enhances the research experience through traceable browsing history, allowing users to quickly revisit previously viewed material, as well as sortable works lists, bibliographies, discographies, and related reference data. Users can seamlessly switch between original and updated content, ensuring transparency and scholarly accuracy. Additionally, the platform offers extensive cross-referencing tools that connect related material across Egret products, including RILM Music Encyclopedias, DEUMM Online, and the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines, and provides direct links to relevant resources in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and other databases. Designed for modern accessibility, Egret is fully compatible with mobile and tablet devices and supports sophisticated XML-based data editing and tagging, making it a powerful and flexible environment for digital music scholarship.
DEUMM Online is a digitally enhanced music encyclopedia published by RILM, building on Alberto Basso’s Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti from the 1980s and 1990s. Developed as a collaborative effort among Italian and international scholars, it aims to create an Italian-language knowledge base with a distinctly global perspective on music and its circulation worldwide.
Expanding and updating the original print edition, DEUMM Online adds approximately 150 new entries each year. These contributions emphasize areas previously marginalized or overlooked–such as pop, film, jazz, folk, world, and ancient music–alongside emerging concepts and theoretical approaches in music studies, including feminism, gender and race studies, sound studies, and postcolonial perspectives. All entries are authored and reviewed by subject specialists, ensuring the reliability and scholarly quality of the content. Under the leadership of general editors Daniela Castaldo and Antonio Baldassarre, an international network of experts continually revises existing entries and produces new ones, keeping the encyclopedia aligned with ongoing developments in both Italian and global music scholarship.
New articles in DEUMM Online are designed to be comprehensive, offering a complete overview of each topic. They are divided into titled sections that help users navigate complex subjects with significant historical, cultural, or social dimensions. Different sections may be authored by different specialists, ensuring that each aspect is treated by an expert in that area. The content is enhanced with multimedia elements and can be explored through multiple access points, including section titles, article types (including biographies, instruments, genres, and works), occupations and nationalities of the individuals discussed, and sortable timelines. Users can also arrange works and biographies either chronologically or alphabetically, allowing them to tailor how they view and study the material.
Although DEUMM Online is published in Italian, it remains a valuable resource for the international music research community, offering insights into both Italian and global musical traditions. Modern technologies now make it possible to translate Italian into other languages almost instantly, greatly enhancing its accessibility. This allows scholars and enthusiasts to engage more deeply with its content while navigating the complexities of today’s interconnected music landscape. As a result, DEUMM Online stands out for its dynamic and flexible nature, continually adapting to the evolving needs and expectations of its users.
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MGG Online is a leading digital encyclopedia for music scholarship, widely used by researchers worldwide. The platform provides advanced search functionality and research tools while delivering newly authored and substantially revised content, supported by continuous updates, revisions, and additions. Its scope encompasses a broad range of topics across all areas of music, as well as related disciplines including literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Among its key features are a traceable browsing history that enables users to revisit previously consulted materials; sortable lists of works, bibliographies, discographies, and other reference data; and the ability to switch seamlessly between current and earlier versions of individual articles. MGG Online also offers a bilingual English/German interface, with integrated Google Translate enabling immediate translation from German into more than 100 languages. In addition, the platform supports individual user accounts that allow annotations to be created, saved, and shared, and it provides links to related resources, including RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and other scholarly databases.
Building on the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, a reference work that has supported music scholarship since 1949, MGG Online was developed by Bärenreiter and J.B. Metzler in partnership with RILM. Conceived in response to the conditions of the digital revolution and the emergence of a digital scholarly environment, MGG Online was envisioned as a new and revised edition of the second MGG. Unlike a traditional print edition produced at a single moment in time, the project has been developed incrementally, evolving continuously as new material is added and existing content is revised. As a digital lexicon, MGG Online constitutes a living scholarly resource that undergoes ongoing expansion, revision, and renewal.
The original encyclopedia sought to provide a synoptic presentation of knowledge that would, in turn, stimulate the generation of further knowledge. MGG Online remains committed to these principles, producing scholarship that adheres to the highest editorial standards and presents information in a transparent and accessible manner. In this respect, the project is best understood as a work in progress. RILM’s role in the partnership establishes a direct connection to rigorously structured research tools and bibliographic resources. Articles undergo review by multiple subject specialists and are subject to extensive editorial revision and repeated amendment, ensuring their scholarly reliability and quality.
In this context, MGG Online exists in a dynamic tension between continual modification and stable archival structures. Although the digital encyclopedia can respond quickly to developments in scholarship and the broader global cultural landscape, revisions are undertaken with careful deliberation rather than haste, thereby avoiding the ephemerality that characterized many early forms of Internet-based knowledge dissemination.
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