Digitizing the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale Archive of Music Periodicals, 1800 to 1950

FAIN: PW-50015-08

RIPM Consortium Ltd. (Baltimore, MD 21211-1955)
H. Robert Cohen (Project Director: July 2007 to April 2012)

The online retrieval of the full texts of more than 500,000 scholarly articles on music from an online database that incorporates 89 journals in 13 languages and covers the period 1800 to 1950.

While an "urgent need" for the retrospective indexing of music periodicals has been recognized since the 1930s, it was not before the early 1980s that RIPM was established to undertake this task (see www.ripm.org). Focusing on journals published between 1800 and 1950 RIPM has, between 1988 and 2007, produced 205 critically-acclaimed volumes and a cumulative online database consisting of over 500,000 annotated records in thirteen languages. One major impediment, however, has prevented RIPM from being fully utilized, namely, the difficulty encountered in locating copies of the journals indexed. Aware of this problem, the RIPM organization has filmed and collected microform copies of many of "its" periodicals. The primary aim of the present undertaking, then, is to create an online full-text archive of "RIPM journals" searchable and "browsable" through the RIPM Online database. This will be the largest digitization project of music periodicals ever undertaken.