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.
