In its earlier days, RILM production relied on manual processes that were quite different from today’s digital workflows. Contributors from around the world submitted records on color-coded paper forms, often in multiple languages. The forms were intentionally double-spaced, giving editors room to make extensive corrections and annotations. Because many submissions arrived from non-native English speakers, editors frequently rewrote abstracts to improve clarity while preserving the author’s meaning. Work was divided according to language expertise. Staff members handled languages they knew, while outside specialists reviewed others. This process often became an unexpected education, with editors gradually acquiring technical vocabulary in languages they had never formally studied. Once edited, the forms were sent to a keyboard operator who entered every record into RILM’s database from home.
The database itself lived on a mainframe computer housed in a separate facility on Manhattan’s West 59th Street. Staff accessed the system via dial-up modems (see first photo of this post) using WYLBUR, a versatile computing system for managing various text types, including computer programs, letters, and manuscripts, through typewriter terminals connected to a computer. It featured remote job entry and retrieval, along with text alignment and justification capabilities. While it may seem outdated today, WYLBUR was a revolutionary innovation at the time. Although mastering its commands posed a challenge for many, the system became user-friendly once learned.
Meanwhile, another room in the RILM office housed thousands of paper copies of RILM Abstracts destined for distribution around the world. Each week, a staff member carefully sorted and organized the outgoing publications by hand–a reminder of how much invisible labor supported international scholarly communication before the internet.
The second installment of the RILMiniscences series features Terence Ford, a former editor-in-chief, who remembers that the organization’s greatest strength was its people. Ford joined RILM in 1981 after beginning graduate studies in musicology at the City University of New York. Like many graduate students at the time, he was assigned to work on one of three major music documentation projects: RILM, the iconography project that would later become one of the four R projects, Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM), or the music collections project. Ford’s first assignment was in iconography, a role that took him to Germany before he returned to New York to join the RILM staff.
Although Ford was simultaneously writing a dissertation, he eventually made the difficult decision to stop working on it. Instead, he forged a career at RILM, beginning as an assistant editor before becoming an editor and, eventually, editor-in-chief from 1989 to 1991. After leaving RILM, he worked for the Modern Language Association and later retrained as a psychoanalyst, a profession he practices today in Los Angeles. Looking back, however, what stands out most to Ford is not the career trajectory but the overall atmosphere of the RILM office itself.
During the 1980s, RILM occupied the third floor of a building on Manhattan’s 42nd Street, where its relatively small staff worked closely together each day. The close quarters fostered friendships that extended beyond professional titles and responsibilities. “RILM back then was like a family,” Ford recalls. As the organization expanded and moved to the tenth floor alongside other music department offices—including that of RILM founder Barry S. Brook–the sense of community endured. Even after Ford’s responsibilities shifted from editing to supervising editors and reviewing their work, the office retained its convivial atmosphere.
Dorothy Curzon, RILM’s managing editor from 1975 to 1991.
Central to creating this environment was Dorothy Curzon, a managing editor whom Ford affectionately describes as the “mother of the office”. Impeccably dressed, elegantly perfumed, and never without beautifully styled hair, Curzon embodied professionalism. She was also a gifted editor and teacher who trained many of RILM’s early influential editors, often emphasizing precision, consistency, and clarity. One of her rituals left a lasting impression on Ford: every payday, Curzon walked around the office personally handing each employee their paycheck and thanking them individually for their work. As Ford puts it, “Dorothy was so good at making everyone feel appreciated.”
Besides Curzon, the RILM office was filled with other memorable personalities. Rosalie McQuade, a full-time editor, was also a nun who commuted daily from a convent in New Jersey. McQuade carpooled with fellow sisters–some of whom worked at the United Nations–and became known in the office for her singing abilities, especially a song she wrote and often sang titled Buckle up, New Jersey! inspired by her observations that few motorists on the New Jersey highways wore seatbelts. Carl Skoggard was another significant figure in the RILM office. Skoggard handled many of the German-language abstracts and possessed remarkable linguistic abilities. Hidden behind rows of filing cabinets in a corner of the office, he would periodically emerge with an unexpected, humorous story that left everyone laughing.
Carl Skoggard, the RILM editor who established many of the organization’s editorial practices.
There was also Adam O’Connor, whose dry wit enlivened the RILM office. O’Connor, who would later become RILM’s editor-in-chief, had an uncanny ability to switch effortlessly between editing abstracts and reading The New Yorker, Harper’s, or The New York Review of Books, seemingly never missing anything despite dividing his attention. Of course, not every relationship was always harmonious. Ford remembers frequent disagreements in the RILM office based on differing views reflecting wider debates and philosophies within bibliography about how knowledge should be organized and what indexing systems should be used.
Adam J.P. O’Connor, RILM’s editor-in-chief from 1991 to 1996.
During his time at RILM, Ford noted that several publishers and information companies, such as EBSCO and H. W. Wilson Company, recognized RILM’s value and expressed interest in acquiring it, though no sale was ever finalized. What set RILM apart was not just its growing reputation but the dedicated individuals behind its success. More than three decades later, while technologies and editorial workflows have evolved into digital formats, Ford’s most cherished memories center on the people who made up the organization and the relationships that turned the editorial office into a vibrant community rather than just a workplace.
This post is based on an interview conducted with Terence Ford on 16 January 2026.
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In celebration of the 60th anniversary of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), we proudly present a short documentary film. Narrated by Executive Director Tina Frühauf and Executive Editor Zdravko Blažeković, and featuring several current and former RILM staff members, it explores RILM’s history, mission, and evolving role in music scholarship and cultural preservation.
As the film recounts RILM’s evolution from an ambitious vision to an international organization that occupies a unique place within the humanities, it explores ideas that have shaped RILM over six decades: a commitment to documenting the world’s musical and scholarly traditions in all their diversity, and an eagerness to embrace technological innovation, from the computer to generative artificial intelligence. Recent developments, including RILM’s recognition as a UNESCO-accredited NGO, also suggest directions for the organization’s future.
RILM serves a global music research community through an expansive range of bibliographic resources. This film offers a glimpse of the people and ideas that lie behind this endeavor. We hope you enjoy it.
To learn more about RILM and its resources, please visit www.rilm.org.
From its inception in the mid-1960s, it was clear that a sophisticated set of computer programs would be essential to achieve the goals of the newly established RILM project. Automation was the buzzword of the day, with the American Council of Learned Societies collaborating with New York University’s Institute for Computer Research in the Humanities to integrate it across various sectors. However, when RILM’s founder, Barry S. Brook, presented his programming specifications to the Director of the Institute detailing the need for various fonts, accents, indexing, and features like random inputting and automatic numbering of abstracts, the response was far from optimistic. Despite RILM being set to launch in just six months, Brook was told that developing such a program would take approximately three years.
Core memory array of an IBM S/360 with transistor driver boards. (Image courtesy of Ken Shirriff’s blog)
At the time, Brook was also collaborating on a digital musical analysis program at Queen’s College with Richard Golden, a computer science student whom Brook described as “one of those whiz kids who seemed to have been born inside an IBM 360”. After hearing Brook’s specifications for the RILM platform, Golden spent three days pondering the challenge before presenting Brook with a solution in the form of scribbled diagrams and notes. Although Golden could not finish all the software before the publication of the first RILM issue, he successfully completed the programming for the crucial author and subject indexes. Soon after, a fully functional set of programs was up and running, including a custom-built, oversized keyboard that featured four different fonts, all possible accents, compound letters, foreign symbols, and even musical notation. Given that most keyboards at the time only supported capital letters and a single font, the creation of this keyboard was a remarkable feat. It also allowed for editing to be done directly on the computer screen, eliminating the need to sift through complex codes.
In the early 1960s, Barry S. Brook created a standardized form that RILM’s New York offices used to collect abstracts. Printed on thin, color-coded paper, these forms enabled RILM’s first editors to organize and edit submissions efficiently. Each color represented a different language: green for German, yellow for English, orange for Italian, pink for Spanish, and red for Russian. RILM distributed these forms worldwide. As Executive Editor Zdravko Blazeković recalls, the forms were a familiar sight on university campuses around the globe–he first encountered them as a graduate student in Zagreb, long before he later joined RILM in New York.
Editors first filled out the paper forms by hand before transferring the information into an IBM SG360 computer. Used from 1965 to 1978, the SG360 was the first family of computers designed to support both commercial and scientific applications, offering models that ranged from small entry-level systems to large mainframes. The early data-entry program the editors worked with was WYLBUR, a text editor and word processor introduced in 1967. Beyond RILM, WYLBUR was also used at institutions such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and numerous other sites.
While the production of RILM Abstracts has consistently depended on computing technology, the systems available in the 1960s and 1970s were unable to fully support its multilingual and multicultural mission. Even the advanced IBM System/370 mainframe, employed between 1970 and 1988, offered only limited functionality for rendering diverse fonts, writing systems, and diacritical marks. From its founding in 1966, however, RILM prioritized the accurate representation of names and terms–including their display in original scripts–as a central objective.
During the 1960s and 1970s, RILM’s Soviet national committee made significant contributions by supplying many records of Russian-language publications. Because the IBM System/370 mainframe could not render authors’ names and titles in Cyrillic script, RILM editors turned instead to the IBM Selectric typewriter, introduced in 1961. The Selectric quickly became a commercial success, with IBM receiving four times the anticipated number of orders within its first year.
IBM Selectric’s typeballs.
The Selectric’s distinctive typeball–a rotating mechanism resembling a golf ball–improved both typing efficiency and the visual quality of text. Its capacity to switch between multiple fonts and alphabets within seconds anticipated the flexibility of later word processors and personal computers. For RILM editors, the interchangeable typeball served almost as an automated transliteration tool: by installing a Cyrillic typeball, they could generate Russian texts while using a standard Roman-letter keyboard.
The RILM International Center in New York City serves as the organizational hub for the world’s largest music bibliography. One of its strengths is its diverse team of experts, representing various disciplines, languages, and geographic regions. The staff includes music specialists from countries across the globe, many of whom hold doctoral degrees, and are multilingual and are actively involved in a wide range of musical activities.
Bibliographic records are received at the International Center in various formats. Some are entered directly by international committee members into RILM’s custom-built bibliographic database, iBis (Internet Bibliographic Indexing System), or sent in other forms, such as paper, specially tagged digital flat files, or MARC-formatted records downloaded from library catalogs. In some cases, authors can also submit records for their publications via RILM’s online submission forms. RILM also has access to several hundred music journals, either through print copies delivered to the International Center or via online repositories. The journals are reviewed at the office, and relevant materials are accessed into the bibliographic database.
RILM’s editorial staff consists of Assistant Editors and Editors. Assistant Editors are responsible for verifying the accuracy of bibliographic information in records created by RILM committees and submitted by authors. They also enter new records from journals and books sent to the office. Editors focus on bibliographic records that have already been accessed, writing abstracts when necessary, translating abstracts received in other languages, and adding appropriate indexing. Both Assistant Editors and Editors adhere to highly detailed standards, ensuring a thorough verification process for all names, institutions, dates, and concepts included in the records.
RILM staff in 1994.
About one-third of the records are submitted by RILM’s national committees and authors, while two-thirds are produced at the International Center. The largest musicological outputs come from China, the U.S., Germany, and Russia. Chinese and Russian records are especially complex due to the need for bilingual information and varying transliterations of personal and institutional names in non-Roman scripts.
The CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. RILM’s current home.
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The poster above was once displayed in RILM’s Berlin office of the German national committee, where it explained RILM’s mission as an international musicological bibliography. It highlighted early foundational partners, such as the International Musicological Society, the International Association of Music Libraries, and the American Council of Learned Societies. More importantly, the poster encouraged authors to submit abstracts for their publications. A prominent line on the poster sternly cautioned, “Authors who do not provide their own abstracts accept the risk of having no influence on the formal and substantive design of their abstracts.”
Beyond its nostalgic value as a piece of RILM’s history, the poster also underscores the global network of national, supranational, and regional committees that play a key role in ensuring that significant music-related writings from their respective regions are included in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text. These committees, made up of musicologists and librarians from major universities, national libraries, and research institutes, are responsible for gathering and processing abstracts. Given that the core principle of the RILM project was to encourage authors, journal editors, and publishers worldwide to submit abstracts, it was essential to have committees in major music literature-producing countries to collect and send these abstracts to the international center for inclusion.
Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), New Delhi. Image courtesy of AIIS Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology Facebook page.
Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. Image credit: Thierry Rambaud
Today, RILM has committees in countries across the globe, including Japan, Latvia, France, Guatemala, New Zealand, Türkiye, South Africa, and Taiwan, along with regional committees in Hong Kong and supranational committees, such as the one in Africa. In addition, RILM maintains partnerships with a variety of institutions, including the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) in New Delhi, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the National College of Arts in Lahore, and The Journal of the Central Conservatory in Beijing. This extensive network of committees and partnerships plays a crucial role in supporting RILM’s mission to document all forms of music-related publications, from anywhere in the world and in any language.
Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing.
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The greater RILM organization is a global network comprising national, supranational, and regional committees responsible for ensuring that significant writings on music from their respective countries or regions are included in RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text. These committees, made up of musicologists and librarians affiliated with major universities, national libraries, and research institutes, play a critical role in advancing RILM’s global mission.
From its inception, the core principle of the RILM project was to encourage authors, journal editors, and publishers worldwide to contribute abstracts. RILM’s founder, Barry S. Brook, recognized early on the necessity of having dedicated committees in major music literature-producing countries to gather, process, and forward abstracts to the International Center in New York City. To achieve this, hundreds of letters were sent out to solicit cooperation. Additionally, the project received invaluable advice and support from the International Association of Music Libraries, which helped establish 33 national committees by the time the first issue was published. At that point, however, many of these committees were still small, with some consisting of just a single person.
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A 1967 New York Times article titled Who’s writing about music and where reviewed the inaugural quarterly volume of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, released in August of that year. The reviewer commended the publication as “the first permanent attempt to describe regularly what is being written about in the world’s significant literature on music,” observing that it “obviously fills a great need in musicological circles”. Even in its earliest stages, the potential of RILM Abstracts to help shape the field of music research was already being recognized.
1967 New York Times article.
In his 1967 inaugural report, RILM’s founder, Barry S. Brook, emphasized the integral role of authors and librarians in submitting abstracts, identifying the author-generated abstract as the “essential first step in the RILM project”. Drawing on its successful use in the sciences, Brook advocated for its adoption within the humanities to foster scholarly communication and documentation.
Prior to the introduction of online submission forms, all citations and abstracts were submitted manually–either handwritten or typed–on standardized forms like the yellow one shown above. These forms were available in multiple languages and color-coded for efficient sorting. Given the limitations of manual typewriters, corrections and diacritics had to be added by hand. Once received, submissions were retyped into the database at the International Center, and non-English titles and abstracts were translated into English.
Over the decades, RILM has benefited from the dedication of countless volunteers, including many prominent scholars in musicology and ethnomusicology, whose contributions have helped shape the richness and reach of the database.
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