Founded 1966 Website www.rilm.org | Owner IAML, ICTM, and IMS | |
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Industry Indexing and abstracting service Headquarters City University of New York
New York City, New York, United States Key people Barbara Mackenzie, Editor-in-Chief
Zdravko Blazekovic, Executive Editor | ||
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (International Repertory of Music Literature; Internationales Repertorium der Musikliteratur), commonly known by its acronym RILM, seeks to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of music scholarship 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 powerful tools for locating research on all topics related to the discipline.
Contents
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. 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.
Organization
Each of the three sponsoring societies nominates four members to the Commission Mixte International, RILM’s international governing board. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York provides an institutional context for RILM’s International Center.
RILM’s global network provides bibliographic citations and abstracts for items published in their respective countries to the International Center, where they are translated, edited, and indexed; they are then added to the online database, which is updated monthly. 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.
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.
Print publications
The printed version of RILM Current was issued in print through 1999. Besides the printed RILM Current volumes, other printed publications include the 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.