Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (International Repertory of Music Literature; Internationales Repertorium der Musikliteratur), commonly known as [http://www.rilm.org/ RILM] , is an international bibliography of writings on music covering scholarly publications on all kinds of music and published in any language. It covers both current and older literature and contains over 500,000 entries for publications in 214 languages and from 146 countries. The covered material includes articles, books, bibliographies, catalogues, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, Festschriften, films, videos, technical drawings of instruments, facsimile editions, iconographies, commentaries included with critical editions of music, ethnographic recordings, conference proceedings, digital media, and reviews. Each RILM entry provides the title in the original language, an English translation of the title, full bibliographic data, and an abstract with a keyword index. Currently RILM is growing at the rate of over 30,000 listings each year.

RILM’s bibliographic database, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, was issued in print from 1967 through 1999 and is currently available in a [http://www.rilm.org/access/index.html cumulative online database] by subscription. RILM's other [http://rilm.org/publications/index.html printed publications] include the RILM Retrospectives series, initiated in 1972, which includes printed thematic bibliographies of pre-1967 music literature, and a style manual for writing about music.

Organization

RILM was founded in 1966 by the American musicologist Barry S. Brook (1918–1997) under the joint sponsorship of the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres. Each sponsoring society nominates five members to the Commission Mixte International, RILM’s international governing board. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York provides an institutional context for RILM’s International Center. At the time of its founding, RILM was the first abstracted bibliography in the humanities and designated by the American Council of Learned Societies as the pilot project for the development of a computerized, bibliographical system in the humanities to serve as a model for the more than 30 constituent scholarly societies of the ACLS. RILM’s development of procedures for computerized data processing was immediately adopted by RILA (Répertoire International de Littérature d’Art), founded upon RILM’s model, which started publishing abstracts in 1975.

RILM’s [http://www.rilm.org/globalNetwork/index.html global network] provides bibliographic citations and abstracts for items published in their respective countries to the International Center, where they are translated, edited and indexed; they are then added to the online database, which is updated monthly. Bibliographic information and abstracts—as well as journals that have not yet been covered by RILM—can also be [http://www.rilm.org/submissions/index.html submitted] directly to the International Center in New York.

Bibliography

*Barry S. Brook, “Some new paths for music bibliography”, Computers in humanistic research: Readings and perspectives (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967) 204-211
*Harold Spivacke, “A new journal of abstracts for musicologists”, Computers and the humanities 2/3 (1968) 120 [needs page numbers]
*Barry S. Brook, “Music literature and modern communication: Some revolutionary potentials of the RILM project”, Acta musicologica 42/3-4 (1970) 205-17; also published in Journal of the Indian Musicological Society II/1 (1971) 9-19.
*Barry S. Brook, “Musikliteratur und moderne Kommunikation: Zum Projekt RILM”, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 13/1 (1971) 18-20
*Nanna Schiødt, “RILM: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale”, Dansk musiktidsskrift 45/4 (1970) 168-173
*Barry S. Brook, “The road to RILM”, Modern music librarianship: In honor of Ruth Watanabe, ed. by Alfred Mann (Stuyvesant, Pendragon Press; Kassel: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1989) 85-94
*Schuursma, Ann May Briegleb, “Summary report of activities IAML Project Group on Classification and Indexing”, Fontes artis musicae 37/1 (Jan-Mar 1990), 46-48
*Brook, Barry S., “Music literature and modern communication: Revolutionary potentials of the ACLS/CUNY/RILM project”, College music symposium 40 (2000) 31-41
*Green, Alan, “The RILM project: Charting the seas of modern musicological literature”, College music symposium 40 (2000), 42-54
*Jenkins, Martin D., “A descriptive study of subject indexing and abstracting in International index to music periodicals, RILM abstracts of music literature, and The music index online”, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 57/4 (2001), 834-863