Historical music inventories 1500-1800

The Historical music inventories series is an online resource that brings together different catalogues of music collections from the past. It is a unique tool for understanding music production, transmission and consumption. It allows a better knowledge of the context of preserved sources and brings to light important information about sources or indeed whole music collections that no longer exist. Having the content of the inventory in a digital form creates the opportunity to browse and search a library catalogue as it existed several centuries ago.The series enables the connections between the different musical centres to be better understood by analysing the printed and manuscript music shared (or not) across the inventories. A preparation phase provides a digitization of the (manuscript) source providing the data for the cataloguing. The data in the source are then systematically rearranged in a database. Every record is linked to the page (or pages) in the source carrying the relevant information. The data is compared to existing bibliographical tools, e.g. RISM A/I and EitnerQ. The database is compliant with the RISM cataloguing scheme based on the MARC21 metadata format. The series is a collaborative project started in 2009 by the Institute of Musicology of Fribourg University and the Swiss RISM Office, with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.