Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM)
Répertoire International de Littérature Musical publishes RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, a comprehensive, ongoing guide to publications on music from all over the world. The RILM database is nearing half a million bibliographic records; the number added annually has increased from 2,532 in 1967 to well over 30,000. RILM is available online through CSA, EBSCO, NISC, OCLC, and Ovid and on CD-ROM through NISC. Subscribers represent an international body of scholars, musicians, librarians, students, large universities, small liberal arts colleges, conservatories, public libraries, and research institutes.
RILM's broad international coverage and concise abstracts distinguish it from all other music reference resources. All scholarly works are included: articles, books, bibliographies, catalogues, dissertations, Festschriften, films and videos, iconographies, critical commentaries on editions of works, ethnographic recordings, conference proceedings, electronic resources, and reviews. All kinds of music and related disciplines are within RILM’s scope. A typical entry consists of the title in the original language, an English translation of the title, complete bibliographic data, a content description—or abstract—of up to 200 words, and detailed indexing of names, institutions, and concepts.
RILM’s abstracts reflect the efforts of a large, international team of musicologists, librarians, and translators. The staff of the International Center in New York works with national RILM committees in some 60 countries across the globe. These are composed of musicologists and librarians and are hosted at such institutions as the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Rossijskaja Gosudarstvennaja Biblioteka, and Cornell University. Currently RILM has entries for publications in over 140 languages.
Established in 1966 under the joint sponsorship of the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres, RILM was the pilot project of the interdisciplinary Bibliographic Center planned by the American Council of Learned Societies. The City University of New York graciously provides an institutional context for its endeavors. Our Commission Internationale Mixte, comprising representatives from the two sponsoring societies, form a body of distinguished scholars and librarians.
Recent initiatives
RILM is working to expand the geographical reach of its bibliographic coverage. Since last fall, a group of abstractors in China has been creating records of Chinese publications on music (over 2000 have been completed so far), and since the year before that a group in Africa has been working to cover publications from that continent. More such initiatives, especially in Asia and the Middle East, are in the planning stages..
In addition to working on current bibliography, RILM has published a style manual called How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style, whose first printing sold out in six months. A second edition, revised and expanded, was published last year.
RILM is in the process of building a robust retrospective file aimed at indexing literature published before 1967, the year our coverage began. The first step, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was to abstract and index articles published in conference proceedings. The project resulted in a major volume entitled Speaking of Music: Music Conferences, 1835-1966, and led to a large international conference hosted by RILM on music historiography. The second step, funded by the NEH and in process now, involves abstracting and indexing articles in Festschriften published before 1967. The third step will focus on articles published in core music journals published before 1966.
Other current projects and goals include the development of an online international thesaurus and the publication of new series focusing of sub-bibliographies on topics currently occupying researchers in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. More generally, we are focusing on making RILM online a more effective tool for users, with, for example, more advanced searching and browsing capabilities.
