Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals [RIPM]

FAIN: PW-50646-10

RIPM Consortium Ltd. (Baltimore, MD 21211-1955)
H. Robert Cohen (Project Director: July 2009 to October 2012)

The compilation of 25,000 searchable annotated bibliographic records documenting music and musical life in 20th-century Europe and North and Latin America to be made available online and in 12 printed volumes.

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. Initially focusing on 19th-century music journals, RIPM has, since 1988, produced 247 volumes and an online database of some 550,000 annotated records treating 132 music periodicals. In 2004, RIPM expanded its scope to 1950 and took the first significant step toward filling the widely-acknowledged access gap in music periodical literature published between 1900 and the beginning of the modern indexing projects (1949); and, in 2005 RIPM created an Americas Initiative aimed at treating a number of North and Latin American music journals. This grant would permit RIPM to continue its work both on twentieth-century European journals and on those published in the Americas, and to produce twelve volumes and the equivalent data in electronic formats.