RIPM: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1800-1950) / Online Archive of Music Periodicals
The development of musical romanticism coincided with the parallel development of musical journalism and the creation of a very large number of periodicals dealing entirely or in part with musical activities. Specialized music journals alone numbering more than 2,000 in the nineteenth century—in addition to daily newspapers, articles in literary periodicals, in theatrical journals and in magazines de mode, as well as engravings and lithographs in the illustrated press—constitute a remarkable documentary resource of immense proportions that is of primary and unquestionable importance to the music historian. Moreover, as the discipline of musicology developed—along with its methodologies and focused interests in the later part of the nineteenth century—one observes the creation of musicology journals, the contents of which set the standard for the modern discipline. Viewed collectively, this remarkable documentary resource permits us both to explore music and musical life in a very detailed manner, as it developed and as it was perceived by its contemporaries, and at the same time to recognize and to profit from the contributions of the founding fathers of the discipline of musicology and those of successive generations of music historians. Yet in spite of the information contained therein, two problems prevented this material from being systematically examined: (1) the limited number of libraries possessing the journals, and (2) the difficulty encountered when one attempts to locate specific information within an available source.
Thus, in the early 1980s, a proposal to create RIPM was presented to the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centers, and soon thereafter to the International Musicological Society. Both organizations strongly endorsed the idea—which had in effect been circulating since the 1920s—of preserving and providing access to this immense documentary resource of immeasurable value. RIPM then was created in 1981 with its charge clearly defined. In 2006 RIPM celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, the publication of over 200 volumes (the first appeared in 1988), and an online database containing over 500,000 annotated records available from EBSCO, NISC, OCLC, and OVID, the result of a successful and ongoing collaboration with scholars and institutions in some twenty countries.
CURRENT ACTIVITIES
RIPM Retrospective Index
Two major initiatives are currently the focus of RIPM's attention: (i) The MONUMENTAL MUSIC JOURNALS INITIATIVE and (ii) The AMERICAS INITIATIVE, the former funded by the Mellon Foundation, the latter by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since RIPM's inception, scholars have very regularly requested that the "monumental journals" be treated by RIPM, seeing them correctly as the cornerstone of this entire corpus of literature. "Monumental journals" are generally recognized by (i) the length and regularity of their publication runs—from over a quarter century to well over one hundred years, (ii) the sheer magnitude of the documentation they contain, (iii) their wide-ranging scope, (iv) the detailed chronicle they reflect of musical life, (v) the overall quality of their reviews, articles and essays, (vi) their interest in subjects of both historical and contemporary significance, (vii) their reflection of international, national and local concerns, and (viii) because they provide extensive primary source material for the study of musical history. With support from the Mellon Foundation, RIPM recently published a fourteen-volume work containing over 50,000 annotated records dealing with The Musical World (London, 1866-1891); efforts now focus on the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig, 1798-1848). RIPM's Americas Initiative aims at treating a large inventory of music periodicals published in the United States and in Latin America. To this end new RIPM groups have already been created in Argentina, Chile and Mexico. RIPM's first four Latin American titles will go to press next month. Five important U.S. journals were also recently completed.
RIPM Online Archive
Offering a full-text version online of the journals treated by RIPM is both the logical consequence of RIPM's quarter-century of activity, and of the remarkable progress of technology over the same period. If in the 1980s and 1990s RIPM's goal was to bring to light the contents of an immensely important and complex corpus of literature, in the new century it is also to bring the literature itself to one's desktop, in a format designed to reflect the nature of the literature and the needs of the scholar. Thus, the RIPM organization has designed a system for the scanning, storing and the online delivery of the vast majority of journals that RIPM indexes. The software is now being tested, with further development ahead, and over 500,000 journal pages have already been scanned in grayscale. The online delivery of the more than one hundred music journals treated to date by RIPM—which will be linked to and accessed through the RIPM database—will constitute one of the most substantial primary resources available online for the study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music history.
There are a number of innovative features in the Archive's delivery system that are designed specifically to facilitate scholarly research (i.e., grayscale and bitonal delivery; annotated records; annotated Calendars introducing Browse Mode; user manipulation of the image; highlighting of the section of the journal page(s) corresponding to the selected record; possibility to "click through" from a journal page relating to one record, to the journal page(s) containing the next record; simultaneous access to both journal page and search results, or to journal page and annotated Calendar). Such features however are best described with illustrations at hand.
The presentation will deal in part with the long-term goals of both the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals and the forthcoming RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals. For additional information see www.ripm.org.
