RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) is an international collaborative programme which aims to document all pre-1850 musical sources surviving in libraries and archives worldwide. These sources include printed and manuscript music, writings on music, and libretti.
Royal Holloway has hosted several collaborative research projects with the RISM (UK) Trust, leading to the creation of the RISM UK database. This database holds records for pre-1800 music manuscripts and single-composer printed editions that have been catalogued in UK libraries to this point. Cataloguing of UK collections continues where funding permits.
RISM’s records on 16th-century printed anthologies digitized as part of the Early Music Online project with Royal Holloway can be located in the British Library catalogue.
Work on the RISM UK database was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and subsequently by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, JISC’s Rapid Digitisation Programme, and Royal Holloway’s Strategic Knowledge Exchange Initiative. Contact Stephen Rose for more details of these projects at Royal Holloway. The UK contribution to the international RISM venture has been co-ordinated, since 1984, by the RISM (UK) Trust, Charity Registration No. 290472, secretary Caroline Shaw.
