Conference Agenda

The Britten Pears Arts (formally, Britten-Pears Foundation) in Aldeburgh, UK holds one of the most comprehensive collections dedicated to a twentieth-century composer, offering an unparalleled view of Benjamin Britten (1913-76)’s creative world. Its manuscripts, annotated scores, correspondence, diaries, rehearsal notes, and performance ephemera provide a detailed record of Britten’s activity during the 1950s—a decade marked by artistic expansion, international touring, and a deepening collaboration with Peter Pears. This presentation introduces the richness of these Aldeburgh holdings and considers how they reshape musicological understanding of Britten’s mid-century output.

Focusing on Winter Words (1953) as a case study, the session examines what these archival sources reveal about Britten’s compositional decisions and interpretive relationships. Drafts and annotations highlight his responses to Hardy’s poetry and the shaping of vocal and pianistic nuance. Letters and rehearsal notes trace the collaborative dialogue between Britten and Pears, while programmes, itineraries, and early press responses situate Winter Words within the cultural and performance networks that supported its early circulation. Collectively, these materials show how the cycle reflects broader artistic concerns evident across Britten’s 1950s work.

The presentation concludes by emphasising the interpretive power of the Aldeburgh archives: their ability to document creative process, preserve ephemeral traces of performance, and illuminate the social and artistic infrastructures surrounding Britten’s music. Highlighting the archive as a site of ongoing discovery, the session demonstrates how direct engagement with primary sources can prompt new perspectives on Britten’s 1950s output.

In October 2025 the Wigmore Hall, one of the UK’s most eminent concert establishments, celebrated the centenary of Rebecca Clarke’s sold-out concert of her own works. This ‘Rebecca Clarke Day’ featured a noteworthy array of lecture-recitals and performances of familiar and previously unheard works. Yet, little was discussed about Clarke’s colleagues, supporting the 1925 recital through their exceptional performances, namely, pianist Myra Hess, violinist Adila Fachiri, singer John Goss, and cellist May Mukle. These musicians were celebrated in their own right – Hess receiving a damehood in 1941 for her musical contributions during wartime, whilst Mukle was regarded as the “greatest lady ’cellist of the world” (‘Ynyshir’, The Rhondda Leader, 1906). Despite their prestige during their lifetime, the legacies of some of these musicians have fallen into obscurity. Notably, May Mukle (1880-1963), whose contributions to musical life in Britain were evidently considerable, has been largely overlooked within British concert history scholarship.

This paper will consider Mukle’s career through the lens of ephemeral research, asking: “what can concert ephemera tell us about this musician’s obscured career, her concertising activities and collaborations?”. By tracing her activities within the Wigmore Hall concert archives, the paper aims to unearth Mukle’s output and versatility as a performer. Furthermore, it reveals that Mukle’s musical identity extended from the role of performer to that of arranger and even composer, further showcasing her resourcefulness as a musician. Finally, the paper will examine Mukle’s collaborators, outlining frequent partnerships, and notes the significance of such networks in her musical career.

The Beatles Monthly Book (1963-1969) is an extremely valuable historical resource. The magazine followed the Beatles’ story, as it was unfolding, from the early days of moptop haircuts to the sombre days of the group’s separation. These 77 issues provide an excellent tool for Beatles scholars, and fans, to understand how the Beatles became such a cultural phenomenon. The magazine provided a direct line not only between the Beatles and their fans, but also within the fan community itself. Through the magazine, fan club secretaries across the globe collaborated to develop a sense of community for Beatles fans.

Beatles Monthly played a significant role in establishing and maintaining the Beatles’ image and fostering the group’s devoted fan community. The magazine, however, is majorly under-represented across Beatles scholarship and within 21st-century fandom discussions. At present, besides a collection of scans accessed via the Internet Archive, there is no resource nor archive specifically dedicated to exploring this invaluable magazine.

As such, this paper aims to highlight the importance of this magazine and argues for its significance within contemporary studies of the Beatles’ cultural impact. Using corpus analysis methods, this project seeks to uncover and catalogue the various untold authorial voices that contributed to the magazine. The paper will also consider potential ways in which the magazine could become more widely accessible for Beatles scholars and fans alike, for instance through an interactive online archive or exhibitions.

The University of Cambridge’s galleries, garden, libraries, archives and museums hold millions of objects spanning the globe and millennia and representing an unparalleled repository of cultural and natural history. However, challenges such as analogue formats, handwritten documentation, fragmented and dispersed objects, multi-lingual sources and multi-dimensional surfaces render much of this material inaccessible. This paper will introduce the AI for Cultural Heritage Hub (ArCH), a proof-of-concept project led by Cambridge University Library.

ArCH aims to deploy the convening power of the University of Cambridge’s distributed network of collections to create a secure workspace that will empower non-technical users to analyse cultural heritage data with AI tools. Alongside the creation of the infrastructure underpinning the secure workspace (or hub) and an associated community of practice, ArCH is using a series of collections-based case studies to investigate the potential of AI to address three challenges: (1) unlocking inaccessible collections; (2) reconstructing fragmentary and dispersed cultural objects; and (3) integrating expert cultural knowledge into AI algorithms.

After providing an overview of the project, the paper will describe how AI tools were used to convert analogue Cambridge University Library catalogue cards into online records. The Music Department at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives has a plethora of sheaf, card and acquisitions catalogues that currently form a barrier to discovery. During the project, we focussed on trialling and improving prompts for different formats of cards. The primary aim is to develop a workflow that can be scaled up into a large-scale retrospective conversion project.

This presentation explores emerging cataloging challenges surrounding self-published and AI-influenced music scores and recordings, a rapidly expanding segment of library collections. By examining a representative sample of catalog records, the study analyzes how libraries currently describe, classify, and provide access to these non-traditional materials. The findings reveal inconsistencies in metadata practices and a lack of standardized approaches for documenting creative processes involving artificial intelligence and independent production. To address these gaps, the presentation proposes updated cataloging strategies, metadata schema enhancements, and inclusive collection development practices that more accurately reflect the diversity of creators, technologies, and global music communities. Ultimately, this research contributes to advancing professional practice at the intersection of AI, digital humanities, and music librarianship, offering guidance for librarians seeking equitable, transparent, and innovative approaches to representing contemporary music creation in the catalog.

The WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge was adopted in Geneva in May 2024, after a 25-year development process.

So far countries have mainly been concerned about scientific issues such as genetics, but this will begin to encompass music and other cultural expression in the years to come. And the treaty will not come into effect until 15 countries have ratified it.

Meanwhile, the treaty brings up issues about indigenous rights that libraries may have to grapple with in the future:

Does this music belong to an individual author/creator, and therefore can be handled under our standard copyright legislation?

Or does the work belong to a group, iwi, tribe, to a culture? And therefore has no copyright status because it has no identifiable creator, or has even more copyright status, not only that of a creator, but also that of belonging to a group who also have to be consulted?

Do libraries have a role in protecting cultural heritage from exploitation, balancing cultural ownership with public sharing?

Is there any way of navigating international use of indigenous music material, including incorporation in AI tools, and widespread social media exploitation (the 'Kardashian' problem)?

I would like to request a 1-hr hybrid meeting for the Advocacy Committee.

Thank you,

Houman Behzadi

Advocacy Committee Membership 2025-26:

Houman Behzadi, Chair (2026)

Maria Aslanidi (2028)

Mari Itoh (2026)

Rebecca Littman (2026)

Beatriz Magalhães Castro (2026)

Niels Mark (2026)

Radmila Milinković (2026)

Hippocrates Cheng (2028)

Luciano Scarpaci (2028)

Daniela Zavala Mora (2028)

Annual meeting of the Fontes Editorial Board.

In an increasingly competitive philanthropic landscape, music library and archives organizations must look beyond traditional fundraising to secure their long-term sustainability. This session will explore the critical role of planned giving as a powerful, yet often underutilized, strategy for non-profit organizations. Planned gifts, which include bequests, charitable trusts, and gift annuities, provide a crucial pathway for donors to make a significant and lasting impact on the institutions they care about, without affecting their current financial position.

Organizations like IAML, dedicated to music libraries, archives and documentation centres, are uniquely positioned to inspire deep loyalty and connection among their members, both active and retired, whose careers and lives have been enriched by participation in the work of the organization. Unlike annual fundraising or short-term campaigns, where funds are raised for a specific purpose and are completely expended, planned giving provides a pathway for IAML members to leave lasting legacies—whether through bequests, endowed funds, or other charitable instruments. Such gifts can support innovative programming, outreach and travel, other initiatives, and help ensure the viability of IAML for the future.

Drawing from best practices in nonprofit development and real-world examples from several IAML national branches, this session will outline the differences between fundraising and development, and how planned gifts could work for IAML in stabilizing its financial future.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how music libraries describe, preserve, analyze, and provide access to music materials. While AI tools offer efficiencies and new research possibilities, they also raise important questions about accuracy, ethics, authorship, and the continuing role of human expertise. This panel brings together music librarians and information professionals to demystify AI by examining how these technologies work and how they intersect with core music library workflows.

The session begins with a shared, non-technical overview of AI as a set of computational techniques that recognize patterns, generate probabilistic outputs, and automate tasks based on large datasets. This framing establishes a foundation for understanding how AI tools are trained, what data they rely on, and why human interpretation and oversight remain essential.

Panelists will present brief (5–7 minute) case-based contributions focused on key music library processes, followed by a moderated discussion connecting workflows and ethical considerations. Dedicated time for audience engagement will support international dialogue and peer learning.

Topics include: AI-assisted cataloging (metadata generation, authority control, and quality review); optical and handwritten music recognition in digitized collections; AI-supported research and writing (discovery, summarization, and academic integrity); and generative AI in music creation. Throughout, panelists will emphasize both practical applications and the limitations of AI, particularly in handling music-specific data and diverse notational systems.

This panel aims to foster informed, critical engagement with emerging tools.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the session, attendees will be able to:

• Compare applications of AI across music library workflows
• Identify shared challenges and discipline-specific limitations
• Apply ethical and responsible-use principles in AI-related services
• Engage more confidently in institutional and instructional conversations about AI

L’intelligence artificielle transforme rapidement la manière dont les bibliothèques musicales décrivent, préservent, analysent et donnent accès aux documents musicaux. Si les outils d’IA offrent des gains d’efficacité et ouvrent de nouvelles possibilités de recherche, ils soulèvent également d’importantes questions concernant l’exactitude, l’éthique, la paternité des œuvres et le rôle continu de l’expertise humaine. Ce panel réunit des bibliothécaires musicaux et des professionnels de l’information afin de démystifier l’IA en examinant le fonctionnement de ces technologies et leur interaction avec les flux de travail fondamentaux des bibliothèques musicales.

La session débutera par une présentation commune, non technique, de l’IA en tant qu’ensemble de techniques computationnelles permettant de reconnaître des motifs, de générer des résultats probabilistes et d’automatiser des tâches à partir de grands ensembles de données. Ce cadrage établit une base pour comprendre comment les outils d’IA sont entraînés, sur quelles données ils reposent et pourquoi l’interprétation et la supervision humaines demeurent essentielles.

Les intervenants proposeront de brèves contributions (5 à 7 minutes) fondées sur des études de cas portant sur des processus clés des bibliothèques musicales, suivies d’une discussion modérée reliant les flux de travail et les enjeux éthiques. Un temps dédié aux échanges avec le public favorisera le dialogue international et l’apprentissage entre pairs.

Les sujets abordés incluent : le catalogage assisté par IA (génération de métadonnées, contrôle d’autorité et révision de la qualité) ; la reconnaissance optique et manuscrite de la musique dans les collections numérisées ; la recherche et la rédaction assistées par IA (découverte, synthèse et intégrité académique) ; ainsi que l’IA générative dans la création musicale. Tout au long de la session, les intervenants mettront en lumière à la fois les applications pratiques et les limites de l’IA, notamment en ce qui concerne le traitement des données spécifiques à la musique et la diversité des systèmes de notation.

Ce panel vise à encourager un engagement éclairé et critique envers les outils émergents.

Objectifs d’apprentissage :

À l’issue de la session, les participants seront en mesure de :

• Comparer les applications de l’IA dans les flux de travail des bibliothèques musicales
• Identifier les défis communs et les limites propres à la discipline
• Appliquer des principes d’utilisation éthique et responsable des services liés à l’IA
• Participer avec plus d’assurance aux discussions institutionnelles et pédagogiques sur l’IA

In 2026, while IAML celebrates its 75^th anniversary, the Manuel de Falla Archive commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the composer’s birth. This coincidence invites us to ask: how do we deal with an anniversary? The Spanish Government has declared Falla’s 150^th an event of exceptional public interest (Real Decreto-ley 8 July 2025), acknowledging its cultural relevance, international dimension, and social impact.

For this occasion, the Archive has prepared a programme presented in Paris in February combining dissemination activities as films, concerts, publications and others for all publics, with long-term archival work. Among these initiatives, there is also a calendar designed to gather all the events generated around Falla in 2026 —concerts, conferences, competitions, and staged productions— from a wide range of institutions and countries. Another result presented in Paris is the completion of the description of Falla’s correspondence —with more than 23.000 letters from 2.400 different correspondents— in pares.mcu.es, the Spanish Archives Portal managed by the Ministry of Culture.

These projects fit into three categories: those completed specifically for and presented in 2026; those prepared during 2024-2025 for development during the anniversary year; and those whose funding or initial steps begin in 2026 but whose execution will continue afterwards.

While anniversaries attract funding and public attention, they may overshadow the ongoing, essential needs of the institution: cataloguing, preservation, digitalisation, maintenance of the OPAC… This paper reflects on how to balance (or not) celebratory expectations with the daily responsibilities of an archive, and on what commemorations reveal about institutional priorities.

According to the traditional definition, an archive is a repository of personal,

collective, and historical memory, which provides investigation of the past and

projection of the future. The arbitrary choice of the personal and historical memories

proper exemplifies not only the discourse of memory, but also the discourse of

oblivion. Development of digital humanities since the 1960s resulted in the radical

redefinition of the archive, that is, the emerging digital web archives, which had a

strong impact to (ethno)musicological research too.

I will examine previously unknown archival sources that enable a new

perspective on musical life at the margins of the Habsburg Monarchy, particularly in

the Banat. The Historical Archive of Pančevo holds precious documents that attest to

a rich pluricultural musical life – the activities of German, Serbian Hungarian, and

Jewish choral societies, theatre troupes, instrumental ensembles and international

musicians. To enter the Austrian Empire, these groups had to receive official

permission with a detailed listed plan of activities and programmes, submitted to the

main office (Magistrat) at the southern border between the Austrian and Ottoman

Empires in Pančevo. This material will be framed within theories of archives and

memory.

The quest for Greekness (Hellenikotita), which runs through the works of the leading creators of the ‘1930s Generation’ (Genia tou Trianta), in literature, the visual arts, music and dance, is linked directly with the music and the soundscapes which emerge from the painting of A. Tassos and Giorgos Sikeliotis’.

Tassos and Sikeliotis were deeply anthropocentric with clear social concerns for the struggles of the people of the time in which they were militants. Both painters, almost the same age (born 1914 and 1917), lived parallel lives, with starting point two refugee neighbourhoods in which they grew up, respectively Dourgouti (Neos Kosmos) and Kaisariani. Consequently, it is obvious why the reference to the Rebetiko tradition recurs in their works, through depictions of popular instrument-players, musical instruments and the stage line-up of rebetika performers.

Searching for further evidence in old newspapers, journals and documents in the Tonis P. Spiteris Archive in Teloglion about the oeuvre of Sikeliotis and Tassos, became obvious the charm of their oeuvre regarding the depiction of music, especially of Rebetiko. Their lifelong friendship, a journey literally and metaphorically hand in hand in concentric circles crossed courses many times in Thessaloniki, in a particular for the city’s orbit of cultural development.

Rebetiko is a special chapter in Greek urban culture, during the first half of the twentieth century. With influences from folk song and the songs of Asia Minor, it reflects the historical and social milieu of the period, the life of the poorer classes and of vulnerable marginal groups; it was expanded to the refugees and –especially in the postwar years– to the middle class, while today it is a popular cultural legacy that was entered in 2017 by UNESCO in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

In the Interwar years Rebetiko was persecuted by the censorship of the Metaxas dictatorship. During the Civil War Foivos Anoyanakis, (Rizospastis, 28 January 1947), defended the artistic value of the genre, projecting its link with the Byzantine and folk musical tradition. He was followed by the young Manos Hadjidakis, who presented it in January 1949 in his historic lecture to the astonished bourgeois audience in Athens. Due to Christianopoulos and DIAGONIOS, Rebetico had a special blow in Thessaloniki, testified also by rare testimonies of the Christianopoulos Archive, kept in the Library of the Aristotle University of Thesssaloniki.

Tassos’ and Sikeliotis’ personal codes and vocabulary coincided with the ‘aesthetic’ of Rebetiko (cf. the Byzantine-oriental scales and the ‘horizontal’ melodic development without the ‘vertical’ harmonic accords of the West): the two painters consciously abolished in their works shadow and perspective, preferring the foreground level with clear shapes and single-file figures.

This abstractionist-aligned approach of Sikeliotis was in direct connection with the folk shadow-puppet theatre of Karagiozis as source of inspiration, a folk creation, the ‘absolute folk opera’.

Armenian musical identity has been shaped by centuries of cultural continuity, displacement, and global diasporic exchange. Yet the ways in which this identity is represented—and sometimes obscured—within library and archival collections have received limited scholarly attention. This paper investigates how cataloguing practices, metadata structures, and archival decisions influence the construction, visibility, and interpretation of Armenian musical identity in global information systems.

Through an examination of library records across national, academic, and community collections, the study highlights several layers of complexity: variations in transliteration from Armenian to Latin scripts and inconsistent use of subject headings for genres, instruments, and cultural concepts. These metadata choices can fragment Armenian materials across catalogues, obscure diasporic contributions, and reinforce reductive narratives about Armenian music. At the same time, diaspora archives—often community-driven and digitally emergent—preserve rich materials that broaden and challenge traditional understandings of Armenian musical heritage.

The paper argues that library and archival infrastructures play an active role in mediating cultural identity. By bringing together examples from Armenian communities, it demonstrates how metadata can either support or undermine equitable representation. To address these issues, the paper proposes strategies for creating more culturally responsive cataloguing practices.

Ultimately, this presentation invites dialogue on how music libraries can move beyond neutral description to foster more accurate, inclusive, and globally connected representations of Armenian musical identity—enhancing discovery, supporting research, and honouring the diversity of Armenian cultural expression.

Collection development is a vital stage in establishing any library, as it must support the library’s mission, objectives, and users’ needs. It is an evolving journey that unfolds through multiple stages and requires continuous adaptation. Establishing the first dedicated music library in the region introduced unique challenges.
This paper highlights the key phases of developing the music library’s collections—starting from exploring global publishing sources, seeking local institutions publications related to the music field and evaluate personal and government donations. Finally, purchasing from local and regional bookfairs.
It also presents the challenges encountered during the early acquisition stages, including limited Arabic music resources, varying publisher awareness of music-related content, and the need to guide vendors participating in book fairs to bring more music-focused materials.
Moreover, the paper explores how visitors’ interests, feedback, and usage patterns have significantly shaped the direction of the library’s collection. Their engagement has influenced decisions on expanding genres and enriching the collection through greater diversity between books and digital resources, including the collection of all Royal Opera House Muscat productions. This aligns with the third principle of library science, as articulated by Sir S. R. Ranganathan: “every book its reader.”
Ultimately, this work showcases how the library’s collection-building strategy continues to evolve through a dynamic dialogue between publishers, visitors, and the library’s vision to promote music awareness and appreciation in the region.

Die Sammlungsentwicklung ist eine entscheidende Phase beim Aufbau jeder Bibliothek, da sie die Mission, die Ziele und die Bedürfnisse der Nutzer unterstützen muss. Sie ist eine sich entwickelnde Reise, die sich über mehrere Stufen entfaltet und kontinuierliche Anpassungen erfordert. Die Einrichtung der ersten spezialisierten Musikbibliothek in der Region brachte einzigartige Herausforderungen mit sich.

Dieses Papier hebt die wichtigsten Phasen der Entwicklung der Sammlungen der Musikbibliothek hervor – beginnend mit der Erschließung globaler Publikationsquellen, der Suche nach Veröffentlichungen lokaler Institutionen im Bereich Musik und der Bewertung von persönlichen und staatlichen Spenden. Schließlich wurden Käufe auf lokalen und regionalen Buchmessen getätigt.

Es werden auch die Herausforderungen beschrieben, die in den frühen Erwerbsphasen auftraten, einschließlich begrenzter arabischer Musikressourcen, unterschiedlicher Bekanntheit der Verlage über musikbezogene Inhalte und der Notwendigkeit, Anbieter auf Buchmessen anzuleiten, mehr musikfokussierte Materialien bereitzustellen.

Darüber hinaus untersucht das Papier, wie die Interessen, das Feedback und die Nutzungsmuster der Besucher die Ausrichtung der Bibliothekssammlung maßgeblich geprägt haben. Ihr Engagement beeinflusste Entscheidungen zur Erweiterung der Genres und zur Bereicherung der Sammlung durch größere Vielfalt zwischen gedruckten und digitalen Ressourcen, einschließlich der Sammlung aller Produktionen des Royal Opera House Muscat. Dies steht im Einklang mit dem dritten Prinzip der Bibliothekswissenschaft, wie von Sir S. R. Ranganathan formuliert: „Jedes Buch seinen Leser.“

Letztlich zeigt diese Arbeit, wie sich die Strategie zum Aufbau der Bibliothekssammlung weiterhin durch einen dynamischen Dialog zwischen Verlagen, Besuchern und der Vision der Bibliothek entwickelt, um das Bewusstsein und die Wertschätzung für Musik in der Region zu fördern.

The Literary Archive of the Slovak National Library is a department that preserves, protects and makes accessible archival documents of Slovak culture, especially in the fields of literature and music. This paper provides an overview of the institution's more than 70-year history and its place in the context of other Slovak institutions. The creation of music collections and archives focuses primarily on the lives and works of prominent personalities in Slovak musical culture – particularly composers, musicians and musicologists – and on the activities of cultural associations, organisations and societies. Given the historical context of today's Slovakia, the archive also preserves musical artefacts of broader provenance, especially in collections held mainly by monasteries and other historical buildings. The music collection of the Literary Archive contains more than two hundred personal and institutional archives, song and historical collections, and the Collection of Individual Musical Pieces. Overall, these represent artefacts from the 11th century to the present, particularly manuscript sheet music, liturgical books and hymnals, collections of folk songs, historical music prints, and also musicological works, period correspondence, photographs, sound media from phonograph cylinders, shellac records and MG tapes, through to contemporary audiovisual recordings. The aim of this paper is to present the most significant artefacts, and the current status of their accessibility in the RISM database and the Slovak DIKDA database.

Josephine Baroni-Cavalcabò was a gifted singer and the center of a musical circle that included Franz Xaver Mozart, the youngest son of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her own music collection came to Salzburg along with Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart's collection, which she donated to the Salzburg Dommusikverein und Mozarteum. Her salon was initially located in Lviv. When she moved to Vienna with her family in the late 1830s, a new salon began at their flat at Grünangergasse in Vienna. At both locations, she maintained interesting musical connections, first with the Schubert circle, and later with Robert and Clara Schumann. The paper aims at shedding light at Josephine Baroni-Cavalcabò’s network and at her agency in music.

Music research is the work of placing a magnifying glass on an overlooked part of music and history, greatly enlarging it. The efforts of all archivists and music librarians to organize, catalog, systemize and conveniently provide historical materials contribute significantly to research. So, the fact that research can begin with recorded and archived materials is an immense fortune for musicologists.

My research, which began in 2020 with a single photograph discovered in University of Michigan library, culminated in a paper published in 2022. This paper focused on a female pianist Kyung-shyn Song(1914-2010) active in modern Korea. Although her name had scarcely been mentioned after 1950, she was a Pyongyang-born pianist celebrated as a child prodigy and musical genius in the Korean music scene at the time. She was also appointed as a piano faculty at Michigan State University in 1947, making her the first Korean to hold such a position in the United States. By tracing her with newspapers, historical records and university-held materials, I located and contacted with her youngest daughter, and was able to verify several privately held photographs. Thus, I uncovered the biography and musical activities of this forgotten musician.

In 2024, Song’s family decided to preserve the original letters sent from Pyongyang to the United States almost 100 years ago. I had translated these letters and envelopes, hand-written in old Korean with Chinese and Japanese, into contemporary Korean. And they will be archived at the Nam Center for Korean Studies(NCKS), University of Michigan.

Collections from Silesian Cistercian monasteries, particularly Lubiąż, preserve
numerous opera arias, including castrato repertoire (30 arias!). This article examines their use in
the monastery – both liturgical and non-liturgical – explores methods of adaptation, and
considers possible performers. Adapting castrato arias for the monastery resulted not
only transforming the text into religious content, but also altering the performance
space, both acoustically and visually. In both opera and church, arias were intended to
move the audience emotionally.

For a number of years now, three different music collections have been brought together to form the Music Floor in The Hague Public Library. Merging three diverse collections presents a number of challenges. The nature of the collections and their target audiences vary greatly. The question is how to connect an educational library (Royal Conservatoire), a public library (The Hague Public Library), and a special library (Collections Netherlands Music Institute). What choices do you make with regard to the system and the catalog format? Is Marc21 the right choice, and does it work as long as the institutions operate in different systems? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Marc21 when it comes to cataloging sheet music?
This presentation will attempt to identify the problems that arise and formulate possible solutions.
The Music Floor is a unique collaboration in the Netherlands. At a time when public libraries are drastically downsizing or cutting back on their music collections, The Hague is creating the largest publicly accessible music collection in the Netherlands.

This presentation outlines the endeavor of the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri” to reach out to the D/deaf and hard of hearing community in order to create an accessible and inclusive music appreciation workshop.

The project “Resonance: Music appreciation for the D/deaf and hard of hearing” formed as part of The Europe Challenge programme that brings together teams from libraries and communities across Europe to address the challenges libraries face today. In the project, representatives from both the Music Library and the D/deaf and hard of hearing community, through the cultural organization NGO liminal, worked as a team.

At the heart of the project lies the principle of co-design. The process included a number of open sessions with a varied range of participants such as music professionals, D/deaf and hard of hearing individuals and sign language interpreters. Through the content and feedback gathered from the open sessions the final goal of an inclusive workshop of music appreciation takes shape.

To support the dissemination of knowledge and experience gained from this project, a toolkit with specific strategies and good practices has been comprised providing a valuable resource for other libraries who aspire for openness.

This presentation seeks to highlight the ways in which the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri” of the Friends of Music Society and its staff aspire, through communication as an essential tool of public service, to bridge needs and human identities. Among other aspects, it presents the diverse groups of people who visit the Library, the reasons they choose this space, as well as the needs, expectations, and experiential backgrounds they bring with them. Furthermore, it addresses what “service in practice” means for us, through all the everyday duties that constitute it. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of communication and effective communicative practices in fostering relationships of trust with our community. The presentation also discusses the recurring challenges that test our professional role and explores how these challenges, together with the broader experience of public service, may be transformed into opportunities for learning and critical reflection—opportunities that contribute to our ongoing development and enhance our capacity to build meaningful bridges between needs and human identities.

The University of Toronto Music Library initiated a study in the fall of 2024 to gain insights into students’ uses of physical scores, digital scores, and the library space and collection, broadly conceived, to aid in long-term strategic planning. Questions we sought answers to include to what extent students still used physical scores, how relevant the physical score collection is to their studies, what students like and dislike about digital scores, whether there are specific digital score platforms or technologies that our users prefer, and if students know about the library’s digital score resources. We also sought to know more about students’ experiences with the physical space and staff in the library, what they liked/disliked, and how effective our outreach efforts are. To that end, we ran a series of interviews to qualitatively sample the University of Toronto Faculty of Music community. The rich data that resulted has deep implications for collections growth and outreach/engagement. This presentation reports on these findings and proposes some possible avenues the music library is considering as part of ongoing planning to support its music community. While the findings are limited in that they only represent one institution, they are likely to have implications for other music libraries, as well.

The process of composing music, encountered in preliminary sketches, manuscripts, and performances, has formed a central tenet of musical inquiry for nearly two centuries. These primary source materials reveal the development of musical works and, when considered with records of composers’ professional and personal activities, enhance understanding of music history and cultural memory. Documentation ensures the continuity of this research.

Composers now consider notation software, digital audio workstations (DAWs) and other specialized tools as essential to their process as pencil and paper were to their predecessors. They make use of digital platforms to plan projects, collaborate, and document their careers. These actions generate documentation that serves as evidence of contemporary creative work. Despite their importance to the cultural record, long-term preservation of this documentation remains at risk. Software and hardware obsolescence or inaccessibility, the diversity and fragility of proprietary file formats, media degradation, and non-existent or inconsistent metadata all threaten long-term viability. Without intervention, significant absences will emerge in the historical record.

This paper addresses these challenges by presenting findings from a survey of composers about their processes, workflows, and preservation practices. The results identify the most common workflows employed by composers, the types of records they generate, and how composers are presently saving and storing their work, highlighting potential areas of intervention. Based on results and collaboration with stakeholder communities, the authors plan a widely accessible toolkit of resources, workflows, and best practices to bridge the gap between composers’ personal documentation and the digital preservation capacities of archival institutions.

Rising subscription costs for music-specific electronic resources pose growing challenges for libraries, particularly those where budgets are limited and licensing models lack flexibility. Although consortial agreements have proven effective in expanding access and reducing expenditures for general e-resources, little empirical data exists on how music databases and streaming platforms are licensed, funded, and utilized at scale. Addressing this gap, Tenn-Share, the statewide resource-sharing consortium in Tennessee, established a Music Interest Group to explore collaborative solutions. Initial discussions quickly revealed significant disparities in access to core music research and streaming tools, as well as a lack of baseline information to guide collective negotiation.

This presentation reports on the first statewide survey designed to document Tennessee libraries’ subscriptions to, and interest in, music electronic resources. Developed by the University of Tennessee Libraries in partnership with Tenn-Share, the study employs a cross-sectional survey methodology to capture subscription status, demand indicators, perceived value, and local challenges across academic, public, and special libraries. Results of this study facilatated the identification of strong candidates for consortial purchasing agreements. Additionally, early modeling indicates that targeted, data-driven negotiations could reduce institutional expenditures by 40–60% for several high-demand resources while expanding access statewide.

These results reveal clear opportunities for coordinated action, including more equitable access and stronger vendor engagement. The presentation will outline key findings, discuss implications for consortial licensing in music libraries, and propose a scalable model for other states and consortia seeking to strengthen access to specialized music e-resources through data-driven collaboration.

ILAM has been engaged in digital return since around 2014. The process has opened up questions of ownership, access and knowledge. This has been of particular importance with regard to Hugh Tracey’s metadata, which was often erroneous, and his cataloguing system, which was adopted from western practices without critical reflection, and with the exclusion of the performers. The process has also brought to attention the one-sided approach to digital return, such that while recordings were returned to so-called communities of origin there were very few attempts to obtain feedback from these communities after the return.

In this presentation, I focus on one such community in Grahamstown, the place where ILAM is based. I describe how digital return unfolded and the processes by which attempts were made to involve the community in reviving an interest in the music. Hugh Tracey made a large number of recordings of the amaXhosa in the 1950s. Since around 8 years ago, we started returning these recordings to local DJs and other artists. I address in this presentation the negotiations and the outcomes of what occurs when a new generation of artists are involved in a dialogical process of digital return where their voices matter. How, I ask, can digital return restore relations with a new generation of musicians and artists for whom the power to engage with such content is critical?

De nos jours, il faut reconnaitre que nos instruments de musique avaient pour objectifs, en plus de la production sonore, d’autres rôles purement fonctionnels. A l’ère de la mondialisation, où le culturel et le capital font bon ménage, les décideurs et investisseurs africains se doivent de repenser une nouvelle vision dans l’exploitation et l’utilisation de nos instruments de musique traditionnels tout en restants vigilants de la sauvegarde de nos identités culturelles que charrient ces objets sonores. Alors, quelles stratégies adoptées pour aller vers la standardisation de certains instruments de musique traditionnels africains ? Si nous regardons derrière nous, nous constatons que la plus part des instruments modernes hérités proviennent de traditions parfois plus récentes que celles de nos instruments. La présente communication est de faite l’état des lieux de la question et de faire une analyser sur les enjeux socio-économiques pour permettre à nos décideurs de mieux se pencher sur la question.

Choro, one of Brazil’s oldest urban musical genres, was recognized as cultural heritage in 2024, following an intense data collection process (2020–2023). This effort resulted in the creation of the Base de dados Choro Patrimônio (Choro Heritage Database) structured on the open-source Tainacan Platform, offering online access and featuring a collaborative nature. This paper demonstrates the crucial role of digital and collaborative databases as effective safeguarding actions for Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH);

The adoption of Information and Communication Technologies is recognized as a valuable tool to preserve, disseminate, and teach about ICH, including traditional music and dances, aligning with the Intelligent Heritage Management paradigm. However, systematic literature reviews show that the implementation of technological solutions is highly skewed: between 2018 and 2022, 92% of interventions focused on tangible heritage, with ICH representing only 5% of applicationsThe Choro Heritage Database, which maps collections, performance venues, teaching actions, and collectives, directly addresses this research and application gap.

This initiative is particularly vital in the Brazilian context, where memory institutions often exhibit fragmented actions and a lack of standardization and integration for the reuse of cultural data, despite the growing importance of digital transformation. The Database's collaborative and continuously maintained structure strengthens the research and dissemination ecosystem for Choro, proving the effectiveness of open digital platforms in cultural preservation. This analysis of this initiative utilizes the concept of Data Objects [Alaimo (2022); Kallinikos et al,(2010)] and the debate on digital integration within Brazilian memory institutions [Martins et al. (2023); Rocha (2025)].

Knowledge synthesis, including systematic reviews, scoping reviews, meta-analyses, and other rigorous methodologies, are gaining prominence in music research. These transparent and reproductible approaches enable researchers to identify, analyze, and synthesize all available data on a topic, thereby establishing best practices and identifying new research avenues. Unlike traditional narrative literature reviews, knowledge synthesis follows strict protocols with clearly defined inclusion/exclusion criteria, systematic search strategies, and dual screening processes to ensure scientific rigor and reproducibility.

A rapid search across major databases (ERIC, RILM, Music Index, Medline, and PsycInfo) demonstrates a growth in the publication of knowledge syntheses in music since 2020. This growth reflects the expanding application of evidence-based methodologies across diverse music research areas, including music education, music psychology, and music therapy.

Librarians play a crucial role in ensuring the quality and success of these complex research projects. Research demonstrates that systematic reviews co-authored by librarians are associated with lower risk of bias compared to those having no librarian participation. Librarians contribute essential expertise in developing and documenting search strategies, selecting appropriate databases, managing references, producing PRISMA flow diagrams, and writing methodology sections.

This presentation will explore the evolving landscape of knowledge syntheses in music research and examine how librarians are transitioning from consultative support roles to full collaborative partnerships as co-authors, ultimately strengthening the scientific integrity of music scholarship.

L’élaboration des synthèses de la connaissance (revues systématiques, études de la portée, méta-analyses, etc.) gagne en importance dans le domaine musical. Ces méthodologies rigoureuses, transparentes et reproductibles permettent de repérer, analyser et synthétiser l’ensemble des données sur un sujet, identifiant ainsi les meilleures pratiques et les nouvelles avenues de recherche.

Cette présentation explorera la croissance significative de la publication des synthèses de la connaissance en musique depuis 2020, leurs applications en recherche musicale et le rôle crucial que jouent les bibliothécaires dans leur élaboration, du soutien à la collaboration comme coauteur·e, pour assurer la qualité et la rigueur scientifique.

One of the challenges in managing manuscript music collections is the need for continuous comparison between sources due to attributional conflicts, anonymous, spurious and/or untitled works, uncertain works belonging to different centuries. Cataloguers often tend to exclude anything that is not identified by at least one uncertain name. The presence of these anonymous works in several genres is overwhelming, as is currently known, for example, and remaining within Italy, in the handwritten sacred music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the genre of cantatas of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet today, with the increasingly strong presence of musical incipits in online bibliographies, identifying the authors and compositions in these forgotten sources is a project within the reach of any library with manuscript music collections.

Currently (December 2025), the Italian OPAC SBN catalogue lists over 280,000 musical manuscripts catalogued by countless libraries in Italy, but only 3,871 of these are unattributed or anonymous manuscripts, of which 2,247 have been identified (in RISM, anonymous manuscripts in the same period were just over 21%). There is no doubt that their identification, at least in the OPAC SBN, was the condition that determined their later cataloguing. As regards identification strategies, comparisons can also be made with digitised works, as in the case of the pilot project musiconn.scoresearch, which, however, currently returns redundant results. To date, the musical incipit remains a fundamental element among the metadata of musical manuscripts for their correct identification; yet it is not always completed.

Nicholas A. Brown-Cáceres, Acting Chief of the Library of Congress Music Division, discusses the hundred-year history and replicability of the Library's world-renowned concert series, Concerts from the Library of Congress. The series was founded in 1925 by an act of Congress that resulted from the vision, leadership, and philanthropic support of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953). Over the past 100 years, the series has been an important avenue for the Library of Congress and U.S government to play a permanent role in supporting the advancement of music performance and composition by engaging with the American and global public through radio broadcasts, digital media, commissioning of 700+ new works (e.g., "Appalachian Spring" by Martha Graham and Aaron Copland, live events, and cultural diplomacy. The concerts have enriched the Music Division's collections, expanding opportunities for user engagement and leading to major acquisitions of the papers of composers and performers. This session offers a history of the series, how its major supporters have cultivated a legacy of philanthropy, how the series has enriched the Library's collections, and how the Music Division leverages private funding to advance its public mission. The concert series is presented as a model that can be adapted at any size cultural heritage organization to develop a sustainable series of public programs that broaden the reach and relevance of archival collections. Brown-Cáceres draws on the rich stories and objects represented in the presenter's new book, Let the People Hear It: Concerts from the Library of Congress at 100 (2025).

At last year's meeting in Salzburg, we identified a number of key issues that we would like to address at future meetings. One of the most urgent of these was cyber security, which will be our main subject in Thessaloniki. We are looking forward to brief keynotes from the British Library and the German National Library. But, more importantly, we are looking forward to the discussion with all of you.

Please note that the study group is open to anyone interested in issues affecting or impacting the work of national libraries, national music archives, or national documentation centres. You don't have to be a national library representative to participate.

Organizing and describing materials for study and access forms the bedrock of library professionals’ work. The description of film music—combined with the advent of digital technologies—has afforded new possibilities and challenges alike in those efforts. This panel uses the Series C: Film Music of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Edition project as a case study to illustrate the ways in which old and new metadata structures are shaping the materials’ organizational and editorial processes. The first paper in this panel situates the multiple Korngold collections in both the United States and Europe to show how the physical organization of the film music materials have shaped and guided the Werkzeichnis. The second paper then offers a case study exploration of the film music sources for Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). To conclude, the third paper illustrates the potential of a truly born-digital edition that captures, links, and presents film music sources and their metadata, thereby shaping the editorial methodologies of both analogue and digital work catalogues. In so doing, these three papers elucidate direct connections between the disparate locations of materials and their physical organization, editorial principles, and metadata structures. In sum, this panel provides an opportunity to explore metadata schema in practical contexts, with the hope of soliciting rich and fruitful discussion for all attendees.

Conflicts​‍​‌‍​‍‌ of public perspectives on AI in music education consist of comparing joy and hate, but the reality reflected in the everyday classroom practice is stable and quite complicated. This article is about how the music education sector faces AI, adjusts to it, and limits its expansion in music teaching, away from the theoretical discussions to the practical sides of schools.

Using the findings of the music education research, the authors show how teachers work with digital music resources, AI-driven applications, and school library materials under conditions existing in the outside world such as limited time, data privacy, curriculum standards, and institutional requirements. The research does not position AI as a problem or a solution but rather as a stage-set integration process which is variable and dependent on the context.

The article presents a flexible model of AI adoption in music education that considers pedagogical goals, moral issues, and infrastructural challenges based on these facts. The transformation of music libraries and public institutions as the intermediaries between the technological and educational spheres gets a significant part of the paper's attention. Collaborative methods such as curated digital collections, annotated scores, and guided access to historical materials are talked over as possible but disputed ways of improving student engagement.

The paper, referring the local research of South Korea and Germany, demonstrates the differences in strategies of traditions, technology, and access negotiation. It concludes by reflecting on the realistic role of music libraries in supporting music education amid technological and societal change.

Within the field of artificial intelligence (AI), there are so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) that can generate human-like content, synthesize information, translate, explain concepts, and interact with users in ways that help them gain insights into a topic. Writing with AI tools raises ethical questions and issues related to copyright and academic integrity policies. Should there be boundaries for using LLMs in academic writing? Or how much is too much? How can AI be used to gain insight without slipping into imitation and losing one’s personal voice? What does authenticity mean in co-writing with AI? And how can librarians evaluate AI-assisted texts (articles, books) in order to decide whether they should be included in a library’s acquisition list? This paper focuses on ethical issues regarding whether and how AI should be used in academic writing. It addresses these questions in an interactive manner, supported by reference sources aligned with the policies of the European Union and UNESCO concerning the ethical use of artificial intelligence in research and academic writing.

This paper presents a computational study of the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra (NTSO) Archive to examine how the aesthetic vocabulary surrounding Western classical music has evolved in Taiwan over the past six decades. As Taiwan’s oldest symphony orchestra, the NTSO provides a vantage for understanding the formation of a local canon, the development of listening practices, and the shaping of aesthetic values within changing cultural contexts. By analysing long-term programming history, the study highlights the orchestra’s role as a structural force in the development of Taiwan’s contemporary musical identity.

The project draws on a digitised archive of approximately 1,300 programme booklets from 1945 to 2025, documenting more than 2,500 performed works and over 2,100 musicians. These booklets serve as rich artefacts of reception history, revealing how the orchestra has interpreted Western repertoire, framed aesthetic concepts, and mediated musical meaning for the public.

Using an interdisciplinary framework that integrates musicology, digital humanities, and advanced AI-based textual analytics, the study applies large language models (LLMs), text mining, and topic modelling to trace the evolution of aesthetic terminology and long-term patterns in repertoire selection. AI-driven methods allow precise, large-scale analysis of shifting interpretive language and stylistic emphases across different periods.

Preliminary findings show increasing repertoire diversity and a transition from early, formulaic descriptors to more nuanced and locally inflected interpretive language. By uncovering quantitative and linguistic trends, this study illuminates how Taiwan has imagined and articulated its classical-music aesthetic system, while demonstrating the value of applying state-of-the-art AI tools to music library archives.

The scientific edition Encyclopaedia of Tablature is being developed under the editorship of John Griffiths, David Dolata, and Philippe Vendrix as part of the Ricercar Lab at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France. It will be published by Brepols in 2026. It will comprise over 400 examples of tablatures for some forty instruments, selected from thousands of surviving sources, with full-colour facsimiles, transcriptions, and commentaries on all the pieces. The examples will cover the approximate period from 1300 to 1750. The Encyclopaedia of Tablature gathers sources from 130 music libraries and archives from some twenty different countries worldwide. On the one hand, there is obvious value in looking at the varieties of institutions that hold tablature sources, including the large public institutions, the smaller private libraries, and even personal collections (which we can also call libraries). On the other hand, how are these institutions dealing with modern challenges like digitisation and open access? How are issues of ownership or custodianship being solved? How do researchers contend with the lack of uniform criteria for the provision of services? How do discrepancies in efficiency and cost affect their work? What about the use of archival documents in scholarly publications, which will never make any profit? Presented from a collaborator’s point of view (who is both a musicologist and a librarian) and illustrated with selected examples, these are only some of the questions to be discussed in this paper.

Many studies of sheet music and of binder’s volumes (also known as recueils factices, Sammelbände, or álbumes de música) emphasize the importance of dealer’s stamps in identifying both provenance and paths of transmission. Stamps allow librarians, archivists, musicologists, and other researchers to trace the dissemination and consumption of printed music (c.f. Busch 2025; Izquierdo König 2023; Bailey 2021; Gleeson 2019). Some stamps provide detailed information, offering the name of the dealer, the location of the shop, and even the date of the sale. Others are much more obscure, containing only the seller’s initials or a stylized icon, and require extensive detective work. Yet despite their importance to music scholarship, there are no dedicated reference sources for this research. As a result, dealer’s stamps are sometimes confused or conflated with other markings, such as ex libris or royalty stamps.

This presentation describes a project to identify and document music dealer’s stamps from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on representative examples from North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, East Asia, and Oceania. It discusses the history of these examples and their significance within their respective milieux. It surveys some strategies and tools that may be used to interpret these items as well as some of the new questions which emerge from closer study. Ultimately, it illuminates not just this important component of the music trade but also the role of the dealer’s stamp as both a source of information and a form of musical iconography.

With over 200 items, the Ignaz Pleyel Collection held by the Rita Benton Music Library at the University of Iowa represents one of the largest assemblages in the United States of the early printed and manuscript scores of French composer and music publisher, Ignaz Pleyel (1759–1831), thanks to the efforts of the former head of the library, Dr. Rita Benton. With support from Dr. Benton’s family, the multi-year Ignaz Pleyel Project seeks to update and enrich the online presence of the collection to facilitate accessibility and utility for researchers, performers, and public use.

Part one of the project involves ensuring that the library’s records in RISM accurately reflect the collection and are as complete as possible, a challenge considering that many records have not been revised since their initial entry in the online database from the print volumes.

Part two focuses on improving representation of Pleyel’s works on the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library platform by sharing digital copies of scores and parts for public use. The final part of the project is to increase the functionality of the digitized version of the collection curated by the University of Iowa via both image remediation and metadata enhancement. Time and resources permitting, the project will also follow the same steps for items in the collection from Pleyel’s publishing company and design public-facing elements to convey the significance of the collection and sustain the legacy of Dr. Benton’s work.

This presentation will describe the project's creation and goals as well as its challenges and progress.

an introduction to RISM cataloguing, Part 1

please register in advance at contact@rism.info

Serving as a mentor can be an effective and rewarding strategy to grow as a professional and to foster a personalized praxis. Mentors can share their experience, identify tailored ways to support their colleagues, and recognize new areas for their own development. Understanding the needs of today’s mentees can represent a challenge for new mentors—with the shift of much of our work and interaction to the online space, new professionals entering the field post-pandemic may face unprecedented difficulties in connecting with and learning from colleagues and experts. Furthermore, a high number of pandemic related retirements of experienced colleagues has created an imbalance between those interested in receiving mentorship and those who feel qualified and ready to offer it. This shift in the population of confidently prepared mentors, coupled with the altered expectations of a post-COVID work landscape, demands an evolution of mentoring practices and relationships.

In this poster, the presenters explore challenges and opportunities unique to mid-career mentors as they balance providing support for today’s emerging professional mentees while respecting their own needs and capacity. We present a new mentoring tool designed to help both mentors and mentees to reflect on today’s shifting professional norms and practices and to collaboratively identify personalized solutions. The presenters also highlight the ways in which mentoring dyads can shift to a circular model that balances priorities of well-being and shared learning for both the mentor and the mentee.

In recent years, the “Licinio Refice” Conservatory of Music has seen a remarkable openness and exchange with the many musical realities present throughout the province of Frosinone. Within this context, in 2022 the Conservatory published a monograph (Elena Zomparelli, The Musical Heritage of the Province of Frosinone) which—despite the limitations on field research caused by the pandemic in the previous years—revealed a far richer musical heritage than what had previously been recorded in bibliographic repertoires and both Italian and international databases.

The poster aims to present the results of the 2022 research, enriched by the subsequent identification of additional musical collections that remained virtually unknown until very recently. These findings lay the groundwork for initiatives aimed at preserving and promoting this heritage. Moreover, they provide scholars with valuable resources for documenting and reconstructing a significant, yet still largely unexplored, part of the musical history and culture of the Frosinone area.

This case study examines a primary archival music source preserved in the Lin Erh Archive at the Digital Archive Center for Music, NTNU. The archive is the 1965 computer music concert programme “An Evening with ILLIAC II” at the University of Illinois, given by Erh Lin, a composer from Taiwan. Using this programme as a point of departure, the study returns to the performance setting of an early human–machine ensemble and asks how the computer was conceptualised and presented as one of the “performers” in this experimental event.

The programme is designed not as a conventional list of pieces but as a logic flowchart that presents the concert in terms of an “input–processing–output” structure. It links musical inputs—namely the styles of J. S. Bach, J. Brahms, and Lejaren Hiller (Lin’s teacher)—with the "MUSIC PREPARATION" program and the ILLIAC II computer, leading to an output in which a human string quartet performs with the machine. Humorous decision paths such as “Sleepy? → Human Failure; Execution Terminated” write audience response and human–machine interaction into the design of the event, making performance roles and listening logics visually explicit.

Adopting an archival research approach, the study analyses how ILLIAC II is positioned between “instrument”, “system” and “performer”, how the form of early human–machine ensembles shapes listeners’ understanding, and considers how this programme might be catalogued. As a musical source, it merits further attention, offering valuable clues and room for further reflection and research on the early development of computer music.

Aware of the growing impact of artificial intelligence in academic and research contexts, the Commission of Libraries of Conservatories and Higher Music Education Centres of AEDOM —the Asociación Española de Documentación Musical— has decided to undertake a study to analyse how students in Spain’s higher music education institutions integrate these tools into their learning and everyday academic practice.

Through a structured questionnaire, the study will examine aspects such as the frequency and purpose of generative AI use, levels of trust, ethical concerns, ease of integration into educational practice, and expectations regarding institutional support. Its aim is to explore students’ actual habits, perceptions and concerns, and to establish an empirical foundation for the design of future training initiatives.

This initiative is grounded in the conviction that the libraries of these institutions, due to their dual role as specialised centres and as services supporting higher education, must take on an active role as spaces for technological mediation, critical reflection, and information and digital literacy. Beyond their traditional function of providing access to resources, libraries are envisioned as strategic actors in the development of responsible, ethical and pedagogically grounded digital competences.

Based on the results obtained, the Commission aims to develop guidelines and resources that will enable specialised libraries to effectively support a critical, responsible and creative use of artificial intelligence within the field of higher music education.

As part of the bibliographic database of the Musicology Library of the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, a thematic subset focusing on concert criticism and related forms of music journalism is gradually being developed. In the past, records of the music criticism activities of prominent Czech musicologists were also incorporated into the database through the conversion of printed bibliographies. These items now form the basis of a systematically constructed thematic area covering concert reviews, critiques, reports, and programs. The poster will present the current state of this sub-database and the possibilities for its further development, particularly in relation to the planned database of Czech concert life in the first half of the 20th century.

The Department of Music of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) is one of the most important music archives in the world. It is considered to have been founded in 1826. At that time, Moritz von Dietrichstein, as prefect of the Imperial Court Library (today ÖNB), ordered the transfer of material from the Court Music Archive to the Court Library. In the common institution’s narrative, Dietrichstein has the positive image of a preserver of valuable old music manuscripts. His ideological ideas and objectives are hardly considered in previous publications on the Department’s history.

Dietrichstein’s actions must be seen in the context of the efforts of a patriotic and conservative art movement that emerged against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Alongside the music loving Dietrichstein, its supporters included the composer and music writer Ignaz von Mosel, who served as a curator of the Court Library from 1829 and played a decisive role in building up its music collection. Both saw a decline in music and considered it a patriotic duty to emulate the great composers of Austrian’s past. They saw their educational mission not only in making old holdings available to scholarship, but also in collecting and hoarding exemplary works for musical practice.

In my paper, I would like to critically examine the selective acquisition policy of Dietrichstein and Mosel, considering views on art and culture, and show to what extent they have shaped the Department of Music as a place of remembrance that continues to forge identity to this day.

After the remarkable opera works that brought him wide fame—someone considered him Puccini’s heir—the Italian composer Riccardo Zandonai (‘Francesca da Rimini’ was his most famous opera) experienced a period of silence before turning, in the 1930s, to film music, following the example of his former teacher Mascagni. Although deeply attached to the theatre and to its audience and committed to balance tradition and modernism, he declared an increasing sense of estrangement from the theatrical world, because he felt that “art was disappearing”. He contributed to the production of six films, either independently or in collaboration with major figures such as R. Rossellini (‘Princess Tarakanova’). He was enthusiastic about the wide circulation that cinema offered his music, free from the demanding logistics of concert tours; he could even join the audience in their applause.

Beyond the human narrative, however, arises a technical issue: how should documents related to works as different as opera and film soundtracks be catalogued? Distinct approaches are required. According to conceptual models, an opera constitutes an autonomous Work, whereas a soundtrack—despite its musical integrity—is created to serve a filmic Work. It may be fragmented, reordered, or mixed in ways that diverge from the composer’s intentions, and numerous Persons are responsible for the film, with the composer being only one of them. Establishing accurate relationships between the music and the Entities involved in a film’s realization is therefore essential.

Without wise cataloguing criteria, a soundtrack risks generating duplications or conflicting entries.

In 2025, a research project was initiated, focusing on Giampaolo Coral (Trieste, 1944-2011), an Italian composer whose primary archives are housed at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. The project, conducted within a PNRR-funded Ph.D. program in Musicology at the Free University of Bolzano, supervised by Prof. Paolo Somigli and in collaboration with the Conservatory of Lugano, aims to revise the existing catalogue of Coral’s works and compile a reliable inventory suitable for submission to bibliographic repertoires such as RISM and for updating entries in music dictionaries. Furthermore, the project intends to promote Coral’s legacy through live performances of select compositions, leveraging the Conservatory’s role as a higher music education (HME) institution involving music students in dedicated activities.

A qualitative investigation into the educational experiences of participants, students, and teachers will be conducted, involving semi-structured interviews to capture interpretive strategies and perceptions of Coral’s role within the broader 20th-century art music landscape. The investigation addresses the following questions: what specificities, challenges, and difficulties arise in studying these works? How likely are they to become part of the standard repertoire, and why? Did participants know Coral’s music before this project? How much did the project contribute to their musical knowledge, and why?

The project highlights the distinctive value of preserving this archival collection within a higher education institution and the pivotal role of engaging with teaching and learning practices in promoting it. This contribution provides insight into initial findings and discusses challenges and opportunities connected with this innovative approach.

The lyre is the only stringed instrument whose existence is already witnessed in the Minoan and Mycenaean era, which foreshadows its dominance in classical Greece with only the aulos rivaling it in importance, while the other musical instruments assumed only a marginal importance. The lyre compared to the aulos had primacy. It was the only instrument played by an Olympian god (Apollo) and gained the esteem of the other gods. Given that education in Ancient Greece emphasized music, the lyre becomes the ruler of all instruments and never descends from its pedestal even when it disappears from the limelight and passes into the collective unconscious of the Western world as the symbol of music.

Nikos Xanthoulis is the only person that developed a complete method of the Ancient seven string greek lyre and this method is the most important tool of the education of the music educators that want to use it in their classrooms as an instrument of learning music, active listening, storrytelling, singing, moving and expression of the feelings.

Nikos Xanthoulis composed music for solo lyre, for lyre and voice, for lyre and other instruments, concertos for lyre and orchestra. Other composers like Gary Judd, Lowell Libermann, Fazil Say, Veronique Braccot, Thomas Bramel, Nikos Xarizanos, Dimitris Delfinopoulos composed music for the seven string ancient greek lyre. The repertory is growing fast and it is the first time that needs to catalogued.

On this presentation we are going to present you this catalogue and to play fragments of it on the lyre.

Watermarks have become an integral part of research on medieval manuscripts. The Austrian Academy of Sciences hosts a platform for codices in Austrian collections. As a special feature of this platform manuscripta.at is, that it presents images of watermarks and their metadata for approximately 2,000 paper manuscripts at the moment. These manuscripts naturally also include music manuscripts, too.

For example, Klosterneuburg Abbey, Cod. 69, which is written on paper showing watermarks of the motifs snake and eagle. Modern watermark databases, especially WZMA and WZIS, provide more information on these paper marks, e.g. which other manuscripts or documents were made from the same paper. In this case, for example, a manuscript with sacred songs in Munich State Library or with Magnificat compositions in Graz University Library. Can we find more common ground among these sources? Besides the usual dating and locating by watermarks? Let’s go on a journey through collections of Klosterneuburg, Graz, Munich and other places in search of commonalities between sources based on this paper. And beside learn some about using WZMA - Watermarks of the Middle Ages and WZIS - Watermark Information System.

https://manuscripta.at; https://www.wzma.at; https://www.wasserzeichen-online.de

Lleida has historically lacked suitable venues for the performance of dramatic music. During the second half of the 19th century, the city had only two theatres: the Teatre Principal, active in the winter seasons (1842-1876) and the Teatre dels Camps Elisis, used in the summer seasons (1883-1902), both offering limited and often inadequate conditions for staging opera. Moreover, the local bourgeoisie, largely made up of artisans and merchants, did not embrace opera as a cultural marker in the way the Barcelona bourgeoisie did. Consequently, operatic activity in Lleida was scarce and, in many seasons, entirely absent from public stages.

The recent cataloguing of the musical collection of Lleida Cathedral, however, offers new perspectives on this scenario. Within the legacy of Magí Pontí i Ferrer, chapelmaster and organist, a significant number of operatic scores have been identified. This suggests that operatic repertoire circulated in private settings or in small public venues such as cafés and social clubs. The aim of this study is therefore to determine what operatic works were consumed in these private or semi-public contexts, thereby broadening our understanding of Lleida’s musical life beyond its formal theatres.

By analysing these materials alongside the theatrical programming compiled by Herrera-Llop (1998), it becomes possible to compare the repertoire performed outside institutional venues. This study is part of my ongoing PhD thesis, whose aim is to reveal the relationships between people, spaces and institutions that music built in this growing city located in a crossroads between Catalonia and the rest of Spain.

This paper presents a new study of the collection of 78-rpm records from the 1930s that belonged to the Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio and is preserved at the Fondazione "Il Vittoriale degli Italiani" in Gardone Riviera (on the shores of Lake Garda, Italy).

The research focuses on the origins, formation, and early documentation of the collection. Drawing on the preliminary inventory compiled in the 1930s by the librarian Antonio Bruers, the study reconstructs the historical context of the holdings, the criteria that guided their acquisition, and the cultural significance these records held within d’Annunzio’s domestic soundscape.

The paper also presents the cataloguing project aimed at updating and expanding Bruers’ initial documentation and at providing a solid basis for future musicological research on the Poet’s listening practices, aesthetic preferences, and his relationship with the musical culture of his time.

The study discusses how the updated catalogue enables a deeper understanding of repertoire circulation in Italy between the two World Wars and promotes more in-depth scholarly investigations on Gabriele d’Annunzio, offering new critical perspectives on his cultural profile and on his relationship with contemporary musical production. Finally, the project outlines the potential for future valorisation initiatives — including digital access, thematic exhibitions, and interdisciplinary programmes dedicated to sound heritage — demonstrating how enhanced documentation can transform a historically significant yet still little-known collection of 78-rpm records into a resource of broad cultural interest.

Dans l’archivistique contemporaine (M.Schaeverbeke, J.-M.Dureau, O.Krakovitch, M.Hamon), le marketing et la notion de lieu de mémoire convergent autour de l’idée d’une actualisation de l’information, notamment lorsque celle-ci faisait partie du projet initial de l’archive, lié à la préservation d’une identité socioculturelle, ce qui détermine la constitution des collections selon un critère de valeur historique et l’existence d’un lien émotionnel entre le contenu de l’archive et ses conservateurs.

Notre objectif est de spécifier les algorithmes de marketing activés par ces caractéristiques en tant qu’outils de « gestion de la mémoire » (E.I.Murguia), à partir du cas des archives du Conservatoire Rachmaninoff de Paris, conçues dès l’origine par les émigrés comme un moyen de diffusion et de maintien de la tradition musicale russe hors de Russie, et pensées comme des archives historiques destinées à représenter ce patrimoine dans le contexte culturel français (Statuts de La Société musicale russe à l’étranger, 1931, art.II).

+Storytelling (Crafting Narratives, M.Note) : a)monomythe (l’archive-acteur, dont l’histoire traverse le XXᵉ siècle – pertes (Vichy), sauvegardes (A.Kourakine), redécouverte (A.Frilley) ; b)Petal Structure (les photographies, autographes, partitions dédicacées forment la mémoire musicale en pétales) ; c)Framing and Converging Ideas (l’archive-témoignage du destin russo-français du XXᵉ siècle ; faisceau d’idées : dialogue des cultures, vie publique de la diaspora).

+Content Creation : une typologie des produits générateurs de ressources et des stratégies de leur mise en œuvre : a)le contenu éducatif, intégré au processus pédagogique ; b)les événements culturels (concerts, expositions, rencontres) comme des outils de médiation et de valorisation du patrimoine.

This paper considers the status of picture postcards within special collections and in musicological research. With some exceptions, the medium remains overlooked for its ephemerality, despite constituting a ‘communications revolution’ (Gillen 2023) of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. A booming postcard industry mass-produced images of musicians, musical themes, and music-related places, which circulated around the world along with unique messages on the verso. The relationship between recto and verso is particularly difficult to capture as postcards are often treated either simply as items of correspondence or as visual objects of collection or souvenir. This paper begins with brief consideration of insights gleaned from postcards found in musicians’ collections held at the British Library.

I then turn to a corpus of over 700 postcards sent and received by Edward Elgar between 1882 and 1934. Elgar’s lifetime saw the invention, rise in popularity, and ‘golden age’ of the picture postcard, and the composer keenly adopted and interacted with the medium, annotating pictures to mark places he visited and readily deploying the postcard’s classic trope: ‘wish you were here!’. Aided by images and transcriptions made available by Elgar Works, I share some findings of linguistic, social network, and geospatial analyses that speak to the particularities of Elgar’s use of the postcard. Finally, I consider postcards from places that inspired works with ‘distinct “picture-postcard” elements’ (Riley 2007), asking how sometimes complex impressions of travel, place, and feeling split across such postcards’ recto and verso may nuance understandings of Elgar’s music.

For more than 20 years, watermarks have been stored in digital databases. Over time, these databases—and the ways in which they can be used, interconnected, and developed into participatory projects—have evolved significantly. This panel brings together three different perspectives on these developments. If you work with watermarks, or plan to do so, this panel offers a valuable opportunity for exchange.

The impact of World War II was profound on all aspects of American life, and its effect on music libraries deserves renewed exploration. Drawing from archival and primary source documents and building on the foundational work of historians, this presentation explores several themes that emerged during the 1930s and 40s, connecting them to issues in cataloguing, classification, copyright, diversity and inclusion, reference, musicological research, and others that still impact the discipline today. The migration of European scholars fleeing Nazism was accompanied by the influx of rare research items into US institutions. Librarians and musicologists pushed to internationalize their work through activities such as indexing archives and periodicals, as well as microfilming.

To help achieve these goals, in 1937, Otto Kinkeldey, first president of both the Music Library Association and the American Musicological Society, published a list of qualifications for music librarians that diverged from a previous description he authored in 1916, which favored competency in historical musicology over librarianship. The revision embraced both fields, elevating skills like the description and acquisition of materials, while also focusing the discipline on the Western canon, yet major questions were left to be addressed after the war. Were only collections of “musicological significance” worthy of focus? Should public, conservatory, and radio libraries be invited into an association with strong academic library predilections? Nearly a century later, the field continues to reckon with the conflicting decisions made in those pivotal decades. I will leave plenty time for audience interaction, which is especially encouraged.

Librarians adopt technologies in their own distinctive ways, often finding themselves in roles for which they received no formal training. While courses in programming, web development, and database management are abundant, one crucial skill set remains overlooked: project management. Drawing on experience from the development process of the new IAML website, this presentation explores how core competencies from music librarianship can be adapted to project leadership—parts that worked well, parts that did not!

Music librarians already possess the essentials: cooperative cataloguing and metadata management prepares us for technical coordination; multilingual facility enables international communication; maintaining library services for a mix of specialists, researchers, and general users is akin to stakeholder management.

This presentation will address practical dimensions of leading a web development initiative: assembling and coordinating a volunteer-based, geographically dispersed team; engaging stakeholders from diverse perspectives; consensus building and managing expectations; collaborating with external developers; planning data migration with attention to privacy regulations across jurisdictions; and developing sustainable long-term maintenance and security strategies. Attendees will leave with a framework for recognizing and articulating their own transferable competencies, along with concrete strategies for approaching technology projects with confidence as accidental tech librarians.

This presentation will focus on the findings of a study undertaken in 2026 by officers of the Libraries in Music Teaching Institutions Section (LIMTI). Working in cooperation with the Chairs of the National Branches, the study aims to identify and report on the state of music librarianship training offered by, or associated with, IAML institutions. LIMTI researchers want to know where and how librarians in IAML institutions receive their certification in music librarianship; which types of training are offered by IAML institutions and which come from outside; and whether training currently being offered represents an increase or decrease of music librarianship programs and of new librarians graduating from those programs.

Beyond the report on the methodology and the survey questions, there are further implications to be considered from the study. First, what might be the level of influence of IAML institutions on the profession of music librarianship through the training being offered? To attempt to answer this question, the survey will ask about the locations and types of programs offered (for example, in-person or online); the types of degrees offered (whether comprehensive or in conjunction with other librarianship programs); and the number of students enrolled. Additionally, it will be helpful to know whether music librarianship training is on the rise or declining, to better forecast the potential effect on future IAML membership and the impact on IAML institutions.

Italian Conservatory libraries preserve an extraordinary and unique musical heritage, estimated at
around three million bibliographic items.​
These collections include manuscripts and printed music from the sixteenth to the twentieth
century, most of which have been cataloged and described in recent decades in the databases of
the National Library Service (SBN).​
In recent years, attention has finally turned to the importance of undertaking the full digitization of
these documents.​
Until very recently, Italy had shown a certain delay in this field, with only a few systematic projects
and limited financial resources, visible above all through the “Internet Culturale” web portal.​
The situation is now changing in a positive way, with many new digitization projects being
launched.​
Starting in 2022, the Italian Ministry of Culture, supported by European funding, has begun
establishing the large-scale “Digital Library” within the ambitious and wide-ranging “National Plan
for the Digitalisation of Cultural Heritage (PND)”.​
Thanks to the initiative of IAML-Italia, a coordinated action was launched in 2025 to promote the
gradual digitization of numerous musical collections held by Italian Conservatories, with the aim of
providing open-access availability to the international community of librarians, musicians, and
scholars.​
This paper, prepared by the President of IAML-Italia, presents and discusses for the first time an
up-to-date overview of digitization projects already completed and currently in progress.

Marcoemilio Camera
President IAML-Italia
Librarian at Conservatorio di Musica di Como (Italy)

The project to digitize Yannis Constantinidis' personal archive was launched in accordance with the wishes of his family, who entrusted the materials to Professor Lambros Liavas and the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens: to preserve, document, and scientifically utilize a multi-layered collection of documents that encapsulate the composer's creative, intellectual, and professional routes.
The archive possesses composite informative value, comprising handwritten and printed scores, vinyl records and reel-to-reel tapes, concert programs, reviews, letters, articles, personal correspondence, photographs, and radio broadcast scripts, resources that highlight Constantinidis's diverse production.
The documentation process adheres to worldwide standards of description and semantic modeling, including CIDOC CRM, guaranteeing high precision in representing conceptual linkages and facilitating interchange with other cultural collections. At the same time Linked Open Data principles are implemented to facilitate the connection of information to international reference catalogs, so augmenting the potential for comparative study and analysis.
The archive is converted into a dynamic research instrument as a result of this effort, offering new chances for students and the general public to comprehend Constantinidis' work, while also contributing to the preservation and promotion of modern Greek musical heritage.

The project ‘Forgotten Voices‘ is developing a digital infrastructure for the curation and dissemination of forgotten Norwegian composers, with a focus on the rich musical heritage of Western Norway. Bridging the fields of musicology and digital humanities together with archival and library work, the major goal is building a curated digital music archive.

Recently, the Norwegian development of digital thematic work catalogues has been led by the Grieg Research centre at University of Bergen and the University Library, in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Music Documentation at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and Zentrum Musik – Edition – Medien at Universität Paderborn. This digital catalogue project has been based on MerMEId (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data), an advanced and unique tool developed to organize and present digital work catalogues. In our project, it is applied on Norwegian composers associated with the national musical heritage initiative, ranging from the most well-known icons such as Edvard Grieg to ‘forgotten’ female composers, such as Bergen composer Anne-Marie Ørbeck. In our presentation, Ørbeck will be a showcase for the process from the discovery of her archive of letters and manuscripts (donated to Bergen Public Library and on loan to the University Library in Bergen) to the public re-staging of her music after more than 70 years at Bergen Festival in 2023, and the ongoing work on documenting her work for further digital dissemination by means of cataloguing, editing, biographical lexicon articles etc.

an introduction to RISM cataloguing, Part 2

please register in advance at contact@rism.info

Chasing the right version, reading between the lines, cutting, adding, editing – How can the cooperation between the music library and dramaturgy department of an opera house influence the outcome, especially when dealing with an opera’s multiple different versions or scarce material? What are the challenges in research, copyright laws but also in the communication structure and politics in a modern opera house and how is the collaboration of dramaturgs and librarians a key component to an opera’s success? Using three examples out of real life productions of the Aalto Theater Essen, Joseph Bologne’s opera „L’amant anonyme“, the operetta gala „Einmal möchte ich was Närrisches tun“ and the ballet „The Hunchback of Notre Dame“ we illustrate the participation of the two departments in the creative, organisational and administrative process and we highlight the special aspects of „patchwork“-pieces and scores.

This paper outlines the historical development of the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (SOSR) and presents its recordings as key sources for Slovak musical culture. Founded in 1929 as part of the emerging radio broadcasting service, the orchestra evolved from a small ensemble into a representative professional body. Its history reflects the shifting social, cultural, and technological conditions in which radio functioned as an important cultural institution and mediator of musical life. With advancing recording technologies, live broadcasting was complemented and later replaced by systematic sound documentation. The paper examines how these transformations influenced archival practice and shaped the scope of preserved material, which today forms one of the largest collections of orchestral recordings in Slovakia. The discographic section focuses on SOSR’s collaboration with the state-owned label Opus and later with international companies such as Naxos and Marco Polo. These partnerships produced major projects, including cycles of symphonies by Dmitry Shostakovich and Franz Schmidt and representative recordings of Slovak orchestral and operatic repertoire. Such recordings serve as essential sources for studying the orchestra’s interpretative practice and repertoire strategies. The final part addresses current archival and legal challenges related to the preservation, digitisation, and accessibility of historical recordings, as well as the need for systematic management and the development of modern digital sound archives. The paper highlights the SOSR sound collection as a multilayered source base offering new perspectives on the history of Slovak music and raising crucial questions concerning the stewardship of audio heritage in the twenty-first century.

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the performance history of the European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO) from 1978 to 2025, drawing on the orchestra’s comprehensive online concert catalogue. Using a dataset of over 1,000 individual works performed across over 700 concerts in 51 countries, the study examines long-term programming trends, composer representation, and the geopolitical dimensions of repertoire choice.

Methodologically, the research employs data extracted from the concert catalogues and organized in structured spreadsheets, to investigate key questions: How has the orchestra’s programming balanced canonical European masterworks with contemporary and diverse voices? What do patterns in composer nationality, gender, and era reveal about the EUYO’s evolving artistic mission and its role as a cultural ambassador for European integration? The analysis highlights the tension between educational imperatives—exposing young musicians to a core symphonic canon—and a diplomatic mandate to represent a unifying, diverse Europe.

The findings contribute to music library and digital humanities scholarship by demonstrating how performing arts archives can be leveraged to trace institutional identity, assess diversity and inclusion in programming, and understand the role of large-scale youth ensembles in cultural policy. This case study also offers a model for the analysis of similar collections of performance ephemera, showcasing how data-driven methods can uncover narratives of canon formation, cultural diplomacy, and artistic programming within musical institutions.

The circulation of foreign printed music in Portugal, from the date at which music printing first became technically possible, around 1501, until 1834 – the year that marks the end of the Ancien Régime in Portugal and the consolidation of a new liberal constitutional order – offers a key lens through which it is possible to understand the kingdom’s integration into wider European cultural networks. In a context of limited music printing and publishing, access to repertoires intended for the court, for religious and academic institutions, and, increasingly, for an emerging urban public, was largely dependent on foreign editions. The data gathered so far suggest that the main publishing centres reaching Portugal shifted over the course of the period under study, from an initial predominance of Italian centres to a system increasingly dominated by the London–Paris Atlantic axis, which from the eighteenth century onwards was supplemented, on a more limited scale, by editions from Central Europe.

This paper investigates the specific circuits through which printed music circulated, identifying points of entry, mediating agents, and modes of distribution, and seeking to elucidate how these geographical shifts reshaped Portugal’s position within the European landscape of printed music. Methodologically, the study combines an examination of copies preserved in Portuguese libraries and archives with an analysis of catalogues, booksellers’ advertisements, and provenance data. It presents preliminary findings from ongoing research and outlines interpretative hypotheses for future expansion of the corpus.

Last year we presented the experience of cataloguing 9,000 musical manuscripts at the National Library of Portugal (BNP) in just 100 days, an effort that resulted in the creation of controlled terminology and internal guidelines that significantly influenced cataloguing practices for musical collections. This work was carried out within the framework of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, which identified the preservation of intangible heritage as a priority and supported the description and digitisation of the M.M. (Musical Manuscripts) and C.N. (National Conservatory) collections.

In 2025, we set ourselves an even greater challenge: to double the number of documents processed within the same timeframe, To make this new phase possible — aimed not only at the organisation and cataloguing of the material, but also at the future migration of records to RISM — additional working tools had to be developed. Among the most relevant are the mappings created between UNIMARC and MUSCAT fields and subfields, as well as equivalence lists for genres and uniform titles, ensuring interoperability and consistency across systems.

This presentation will discuss the methods and solutions implemented to address the diversity and physical condition of the documents, the specificities of the BNP’s cataloguing software, and the demands of international standardisation. We will also place the project within a broader context, highlighting the role of research units and researchers in safeguarding, enhancing, and disseminating musical heritage, and reflecting on the methodological challenges that arise at the intersection of musicology and library and information science.

This communication presents a detailed report on the migration of the CMBV bibliographic database, a long-standing reference tool compiling scholarly publications published since 1800 on seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French music. Developed and maintained for over twenty years by the research department of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (CMBV), the database has played a central role in supporting musicological research on the French Baroque repertoire. In order to improve sustainability, visibility, and interoperability, the database has undergone a multi-stage migration to the CMBV library’s Integrated Library System (ILS). The communication outlines the methodological choices that guided this process, from data extraction and XML processing to the normalization and harmonization of records in accordance with international bibliographic standards, as UNIMARC. Particular attention is given to the alignment of bibliographic data with the library catalogue in order to reduce redundancies, optimize cataloguing workflows, and foster closer collaboration between research and library services. The report also discusses the experimental use of artificial intelligence tools to assist in data normalization and metadata enhancement, underlining the advantages and drawbacks of its application in library. In parallel, a new user interface was developed, designed in accordance with the institution’s graphic identity while addressing the specific needs of specialized scholarly collections. By providing a critical assessment of the migration process, this contribution aims to share practical insights, highlight challenges encountered, and invite feedback from the professional community to inform future developments and the continued valorization of bibliographic research resources.

In 2018, Byzantine chant was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List. As a living tradition over 2000 years old, its history is rich and multilayered. Translating its written tradition into a machine-readable format is a daunting task, due to the intricacy of its musical signs and the multifarious combinations, conveying subtle musical meanings. The interpretation of these neumes has also changed over time and across regions, often leading to scholarly disagreement. This, in turn, makes the encoding even more complex, especially regarding the choice of the interpretation to be retained.

Our group of leading experts of Byzantine chant has selected 32 neumes of the Chrysanthine Notation (ca. early 19th c.-today), free of scholar’s controversy, regarding their usage and rendition. Each neume is accompanied by relevant information such as its Greek name in various scripts, transliteration and phonetic transcription, intervallic interpretation according to both Byzantine and Western music theory, notational type and additional comments where necessary.

We propose for the first time a taxonomy and the encoding of these initial 32 neumes in the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format. Our goal is that this pilot project will lead into a MEI customization for Byzantine neumes. While being focused on a small sample of neumes, this project is ground-breaking for its novelty and because it shifts the Western-centred focus of MEI. This project promotes the transmission, study and understanding of Byzantine chant and contributes to protect this repertory by enabling it to be documented in new and more comprehensive ways.

Muscat, RISM's cataloging system, can accommodate musical sources with language content written in non-Roman scripts such as Greek, however searching for these materials can be challenging, especially if the text has been transliterated into the Latin alphabet, possibly with inadvertent errors. This problem is not unique to RISM: it is shared across all library databases, and originated in the evolution from handwritten library catalogues to machine-readable systems.

Today, technological solutions such as Unicode have granted RISM and other catalogues the ability to display text in transliteration (useful to those who do not know the original language) and in the script of the source (essential to those who do know the language). The advent of artificial intelligence tools adjacent or native to cataloguing systems offers further opportunities for RISM catalogers thus to enhance their records.

A team comprised of members of the RISM Coordinating Committee will share workflows and best practices demonstrating how we have used Library of Congress Romanization resources, the expertise of our colleagues, and artificial intelligence to display non-Roman scripts such as Cyryllic, Arabic, Korean and Hebrew in RISM records. Our goals are to summarize the tools currently available, as well as to propose new directions for the responsible and trustworthy use of AI to describe music sources in Muscat.

Muscat, le système de catalogage du RISM, permet de traiter des sources musicales dont le contenu textuel est rédigé dans des écritures non latines, telles que le grec ; toutefois, la recherche de ces documents peut s'avérer complexe, en particulier si le texte a été translittéré dans l'alphabet latin, parfois avec des erreurs involontaires. Ce problème n'est pas propre au RISM : il est commun à l'ensemble des bases de données bibliothécaires et trouve son origine dans la transition des catalogues de bibliothèque manuscrits vers les systèmes lisibles par machine.

Aujourd'hui, des solutions technologiques telles qu'Unicode ont conféré au RISM, ainsi qu'à d'autres catalogues, la capacité d'afficher les textes à la fois sous forme translittérée (ce qui est utile pour ceux qui ne maîtrisent pas la langue d'origine) et dans l'écriture propre à la source (ce qui est essentiel pour ceux qui connaissent cette langue). L'avènement d'outils d'intelligence artificielle — qu'ils soient complémentaires aux systèmes de catalogage ou intégrés nativement à ceux-ci — offre aux catalogueurs du RISM de nouvelles opportunités pour enrichir leurs notices.

Une équipe composée de membres du Comité de coordination du RISM présentera des flux de travail et des bonnes pratiques illustrant la manière dont nous avons mis à profit les ressources de romanisation de la Bibliothèque du Congrès, l'expertise de nos collègues et l'intelligence artificielle pour afficher des écritures non latines — telles que le cyrillique, l'arabe, le coréen et l'hébreu — au sein des notices du RISM. Nos objectifs sont de dresser un panorama des outils actuellement disponibles, ainsi que de proposer de nouvelles orientations pour une utilisation responsable et fiable de l'IA dans la description des sources musicales au sein de Muscat.

This presentation highlights a significant yet largely overlooked body of Byzantine musical heritage associated with Nikolaos Mavropoulos (1888–1980), a distinguished chanter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople who later served in Patras and Athens, Greece.

His personal collection which consists of original compositions of his own as well as, of other distinguished cantors and composers of byzantine chant of the early twentieth century, has been arbitrarily divided in two parts and sold to flee markets and auctions by his heirs. These two distinct collections of what is known today as ‘the Nikolaos Mavropoulos Archives’ have been rescued through acquisitions by the Library of Music Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri” respectively.

The collection acquired by the Library of Musical Studies consists of 68 manuscripts and has been fully catalogued at item level in MUSCAT. Furthermore, it became the pilot project which introduced music sources in RISM’s cataloguing program that are outside of the western canon. The other collection acquired by the Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri”, richer in number of composers, compositions (130 manuscripts) and variety of papers has been organized but not yet catalogued.

The paper will focus on how MUSCAT can host separated archival collections and present them virtually unified, for the benefit of research by scholars and performers.B

This paper examines the emergence and development of jazz in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (then a constituent republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) between 1944 and 1970, a period marked by substantial cultural transformation and ideological negotiation. Combining musicological analysis with extensive documentary research, the study reconstructs the structures through which jazz entered and circulated within musical life: radio institutions, amateur cultural societies, visiting international ensembles, concert activities, and the early media sphere.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources preserved in the National and University Library “St. Clement of Ohrid” in Skopje — including newspapers (Nova Makedonija), cultural magazines (Razgledi, Kulturen Život, Makedonka), concert programmes, radio schedules, institutional chronicles, and oral interviews — the paper demonstrates how jazz was mediated, debated and framed within public discourse. These materials reveal a complex interplay between official cultural policy, which alternated between suspicion, regulation and selective support, and the creative agency of musicians who adapted jazz idioms to local artistic, educational and social contexts.

Key figures such as Dragan Gjakonovski–Špato and the ensembles of Radio Skopje illustrate how jazz developed despite ideological constraints, gradually becoming a marker of cultural modernity. By integrating documentary evidence with contextual musicological interpretation, the study offers a new understanding of jazz in Southeastern Europe and highlights its role in shaping cultural identity during the socialist period.

The significance of a library focusing on jazz, rock, and pop music was doubted during the socialist period, just as the value of this music was questioned. Private collectors took over the role of state institutions. Paradoxically, socialist culture planned for the existence of a triple model—library, cinema, and cultural hall—in every town and village. Jazz, rock, and pop music, in the form of SP and LP records, began to be collected in state libraries at the turn of the 1980s, particularly in public-popularizing libraries (such as the Municipal Library of Bratislava), unlike the academically focused libraries. Although music departments in libraries concentrated on classical music, enlightened employees occasionally ordered jazz, rock, and pop music records as well. After the creation of the independent Slovak Republic (1993), the national wealth in this area was also highlighted. Based on existing private collector's archives, the project 10 CD Anthology of Slovak Popular Music (Pavol Zelenay, editor, SF00572331, 2008) was created, documenting archives from the years 1934–1963. Before 1989, the legislative obligation to submit 1–2 copies of editions applied to print publications, but was less explicit for records. After 1989, publishers are obliged to submit LP and CD records to libraries. The unavailability of modern popular music CDs in libraries and distribution issues became key for organizing the Aurel – Academy of Modern Popular Music (2001–2007) under the auspices of the Slovak National Group of IFPI. The activity was terminated in 2007 because the Academy members could not access the CDs to vote seriously.

This presentation is based on a PhD thesis completed in 2025, which examines the historical and conceptual construction of conjuntos regionais, a consolidated instrumental ensemble recurrently employed in the accompaniment of popular music in Brazil during the heyday of radio, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. Hemerographic research, conducted through newspapers and magazines, primarily using the online collection of the National Library of Brazil’s Hemeroteca, played a central methodological role in the development of the study. An exhaustive survey of the press proved crucial to defining the central research problem: the conceptions surrounding the term regional and their reverberations in the trajectories of these ensembles. In this regard, the study seeks to account for the consolidation of such groups by tracing their origins to regionally oriented formations recognised since the second half of the 1910s. It is argued that the term regional evolved from a value-laden quality, associated with ideas of Brazilianness and authenticity, into a specific nomenclature designating these ensembles, synthesised in the expression regional de rádio, as proposed in this research. The presentation aims to demonstrate how hemerographic research contributed to the development of the PhD thesis, enabling the recovery of meanings of the term regional that have faded over time, yet remain fundamental to understanding the trajectory, as well as the consolidation and dissemination, of this musical language throughout Brazil, especially in the musical genres choro and samba.

AI integration in music composition challenges sketch studies by generating unprecedented preparatory materials: datasets, trained neural networks, code repositories or even performance patches. The complexity, heterogeneity, and interdependence of these documents demand new analytical approaches to grasp AI's compositional potentials.

We propose to explore "multimodal sketch studies," a methodology adapted to these materials. Building on [Zattra, 2015] sketch studies methods for computer music and [Visi et al., 2020] horizontal/vertical multimodality framework, our approach involves: systematic collation of digital objects; preliminary description distinguishing source, text, and data; classification of novel document types; visualization of successive states including algorithm versions and multimodal analysis tracing information transformations across representation systems.

We apply this method to works by composers Sam Pluta (Sixty Cycles (2013), Matrix (2017)), Ted Moore (feed & alloy (2018)), and Jérôme Nika (Ex Machina (2022), C'est pour ça (2023)), analyzing preparatory documents the composers entrusted to us. These analyses reveal AI's specific characteristics in composition, particularly concerning "artificial musical memories", a recurring concept among these composers that manifests through stateful algorithms whose weights crystalize compositional intentions yet vary between performances. This phenomenon blurs traditional composition/performance boundaries and raises preservation challenges: how do we document compositional objects whose identity persists despite state variations?

By presenting this methodology oriented towards the understanding of new compositional processes where Ai is involved, we aim at illuminating both the epistemological peculiarities of AI in this artistic context and the needs to better understand intentions and methods of composers who explore these new expressive territories.

The Italian Opera by Women Composers Database was developed by the Conservatorio "G. Nicolini" in Piacenza as part of the Casta Diva: An International Research and Production Digital Platform on Women in Italian Musical Theatre project, which is funded by the NextGenerationEU plan. Conceived as a comprehensive and scientifically structured resource, the database is dedicated to the operatic output of women composers. The objective is to bring to light a significant yet often forgotten repertoire, which has remained hidden in archives and libraries, thereby restoring visibility to a musical heritage marginalised by traditional historiography.

This paper will present the database’s architecture, the data-gathering and verification methods adopted, and the descriptive criteria that guide its organisation. It will illustrate the different layers of information contained in each entry, including biographical profiles of women composers, performance records, musical sources with archival locations, and relevant bibliographic and discographic references.

Particular attention will be devoted to the digital infrastructure, including its capacity for continuous updating, openness to new additions and flexible search tools enabling cross-analyses of genres, historical periods, production contexts and professional networks. The database ultimately aims to serve as an essential reference for rediscovering women’s operatic repertoire, providing scholars and performers with reliable information for new productions, and contributing to the broader promotion of women’s creative contributions to Italian musical theatre.

This paper presents preliminary findings from an ongoing research project devoted to reconstructing the musical culture of Italian Carmelite monasteries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since 2023, supported in part by the Boaga Scholarship funded by the Carmelite General Archive in Rome and by several collaborating institutions, the project has sought to identify, document, and contextualize a wide array of historical evidence. These sources include monastic chronicles, administrative records, early printed books, and music manuscripts and prints produced by or dedicated to Carmelite communities.

The research employs large-scale digital infrastructures such as RISM and CANTUS, which enable systematic identification, cataloguing, and comparative analysis of musical sources across multiple repositories. In addition, the project features an editorial component: beginning in 2025, selected music collections are being published as critical editions within the newly established series Musica Carmelitana.

The multifaceted nature of the project – combining archival research, cataloguing, and critical editing – culminates in a long-term proposal to create a comprehensive bibliographic database of Carmelite music sources in Europe, accompanied by a prosopographic dictionary of Carmelite musicians. Together, these tools are envisioned as a foundation for future international collaboration among music librarians, archivists, and researchers, and as a step toward a more integrated understanding of monastic musical culture in the Baroque era.

This presentation provides an overview of the creation of the Best Practices for Electronic Score Licensing in Music Libraries Project Group, an initiative sponsored by the Libraries in Music Teaching Institutions Section (LIMTI) and approved at the IAML 2025 business meeting in Salzburg. The Project Group is led by the Steering Committee composed of: Houman Behzadi, Chair; Birgit Lechner, Secretary; Carla Williams and Charles Peters, ex officio members (LIMTI). Established to address the growing complexities of electronic score licensing, the project aims to develop comprehensive best practices that support equitable access, legal compliance, and fair compensation across music libraries worldwide.

Williams and Peters will begin by outlining the origins of the proposal and the motivations that shaped the initial vision for the project. Behzadi will then present the project charter in detail, including the governance structure, timelines, deliverables, and risk-management strategies. This section will also introduce the mandates and thematic focus of the nine subgroups: public libraries; orchestra libraries; conservatory libraries; academic libraries; metadata and cataloguing; acquisition and lifecycle; controlled digital lending; ethics and advocacy; licensing and copyright; and user education. The coordination between these subgroups and the Steering Committee, as well as the plan for synthesizing their outputs into model licenses, best-practice guidelines, and educational resources, will also be outlined.

Lechner will provide an update on subgroup recruitment and early progress, highlighting the formation process and initial activities. The session will conclude with time for questions and feedback from the IAML community.

Since the implementation of the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations (2013), the UK’s Sheet Music Task Group has been working towards finding manageable and sustainable solutions to the challenges of collecting digital scores and associated materials as Non-Print Legal Deposit (NPLD). As previously reported by Ridgewell and Chesser (2019) and Roper (2020), a pilot project in 2017-2019 tested workflows for processing PDF scores and capturing associated metadata, resulting in the successful ingest of c.59,000 scores from two participating publishers, Music Sales and Faber. Since then, progress has been limited owing to the consecutive disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023.

This paper reports on progress made since spring 2025. First, I summarise discussions held during workshops for the design of a new Publisher Portal for NPLD materials (due 2026), produced by HighWire Press in consultation with the UK Legal Deposit Libraries. This includes decisions around metadata requirements, and some specific challenges and potential future opportunities posed by less common music notation and exchange formats – notably, the accessibility potential of MusicXML, as it begins to be deployed more widely by some publishers. I also comment on the interim collecting of e-scores from self-publishing composers and small publishers. The paper then broadens to present a state-of-field consideration of interlinked aspects of music publishing that implicate NPLD, including the status of Print-on-Demand and hire materials in the digital age, and digital publishing strategies used by self-publishing composers and newer small music publishers.

The German National Library’s collection mandate covers all texts, images, and sound recordings published in Germany. This responsibility extends beyond physical works to include digital publications.

In recent years, the library has acquired more than 20 million non-physical items, with an annual increase of approximately 2.5 million. These items include e-books, e-journals, digitally published music recordings and digitally published sheet music.

The scale and diversity of digital content present unique challenges requiring fully automated workflows for efficient acquisition, processing, and preservation. To meet these demands, the German National Library has developed key workflows, APIs, metadata converters, and concordances.

This presentation introduces the NoMus Digital Archive, developed by NoMus – an archive and research center dedicated to 20th-century and contemporary music – with a specific focus on the digital preservation and interpretation of the works of Sylvano Bussotti.

The NoMus Digital Archive is conceived as a hybrid documentation system that integrates musical sources, visual materials, performance documentation, and critical writings. Its structure combines traditional archival standards with flexible digital tools, allowing for the coexistence of heterogeneous materials such as scores, sketches, concert programs, correspondence, photographs, video recordings, and performance-related ephemera.

The case of Bussotti is particularly emblematic for exploring the relationship between composition, visual arts, and performance. His works often challenge the boundaries between notated music, graphic art, theatrical gesture, and improvisation. Consequently, performative ephemera—programs, stage notes, annotated scores, costume sketches, and documentation of performance contexts—play a crucial role in reconstructing both the creative process and the history of the reception of his work.

Through the presentation of selected archival examples, this contribution discusses methodological issues relating to the cataloguing, digitization, interpretation, and dissemination of materials present at NoMus, focusing on those belonging to Bussotti.

It also offers a reflection on how performative ephemera can be transformed into active research tools within a digital environment, opening up new perspectives for musicological studies and archival practice.

By addressing these issues, the paper aims to highlight the role of digital music archives and their reenactment in promoting new forms of access, interpretation, and scientific participation.

This paper examines the archival and documentary sources of the Byzantine chant tradition preserved within the five Albanian (Arbëreshë) communities of Sicily, founded between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries after successive waves of migration from different areas of the southern Balkans, including present-day southern Albania, Epirus, the Morea, and neighbouring regions, following the fall of Constantinople in 1453. These communities form an ethno-linguistic minority culturally positioned at the crossroads between East and West, and between written transmission and ritual orality. The study considers liturgical manuscripts held in libraries and ecclesiastical archives, handwritten transcriptions from the late nineteenth century onwards, historical sound recordings, and documentation produced through field research conducted by the author since the early 1990s. Particular attention is devoted to the bearers of traditional knowledge—papades (in Greek, priests), cantors, and members of the community of the faithful—understood through UNESCO concepts of Intangible Cultural Heritage and Living Human Treasures, as custodians of skills and memories transmitted orally and through practice. Within the Greek-Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Piana degli Albanesi, these figures have ensured the continuity of a chant tradition combining Greek-Byzantine liturgical forms with paraliturgical and devotional practices shaped by long-term interaction with the surrounding Latin environment. Of special interest are paraliturgical repertoires, including devotional chants mainly in Arbëreshë, but also in Italian and Greek, which often preserve materials no longer transmitted in neighbouring Sicilian communities.

The superficial and, in many cases, incomplete catalogues of Byzantine music manuscripts in Cyprus constituted the primary impetus for the development of a project aimed at their systematic and analytical cataloguing. Technological advancements, together with the demands of the contemporary scholarly environment, led to the incorporation of digitization as an integral component of the overall plan. This addition not only significantly enhanced the potential benefits of the project but also strengthened its scholarly impact and long-term research value.

The implementation of the project was carried out on the basis of a clearly defined hierarchy of libraries, accompanied by on-site assessments of specific needs and parameters unique to each collection. This structured approach allowed for the effective adaptation of the methodology to the particular characteristics of each library.

The present paper offers an overview of the methodology employed at the various stages of the project, which was carried out over different periods in Cyprus. These stages include the initial design and parameterization of the project, the successive phases of implementation, presentation and approval procedures for digitization, the digitization process itself, and the detailed cataloguing of the musical manuscripts. Particular emphasis is placed on the integration of subcategories of interdisciplinary interest, as well as on the final production of printed catalogues encompassing the various collections.

At the same time, and following a parallel trajectory, the paper presents a comparable project of analytical cataloguing conducted in another monastic setting of exceptional scholarly significance, namely the Monastery of Pantokratoros on Mount Athos. Within the framework of a broader, long-term programme dedicated to the systematic cataloguing of musical manuscripts preserved in the libraries of Athonite monasteries, this specific cataloguing effort yielded particularly significant and noteworthy musicological findings.

Study Group for Byzantine Music Palaeography “Chrysorrhemon”, School for Music Studies, A.U.Th.

This presentation investigates the cycle of nine kalophonic pieces born out of the old Byzantine sticheron Βηθλεὲμ ἑτοιμάζου, in the plagal of the fourth mode, during the Palaeologan Renaissance (1261-1453). It starts from the kalophonic cycle as neumated in late Middle-Byzantine notation, with the manuscript of the Gritsani Collection no 7 from the library of the Holy Metropoly of Zakynthos (middle of 15^th cent.) serving as a dux, and as testified also in other manuscripts containing kalophonic chants, such as Sinai 1234, 1250, 1251, 1253-55 a.o. The old notation will be compared to the transcriptions by Chourmouzios Chartophylax in the analytical neumatic notation of the New Method, from his autograph of the Metochion Sancti Sepulchri 729 (first half of 19^th cent.). Continuing some previous research on the matter, the presentation will refer to the sourcing of the kalophonic style, to issues of critical edition –both traditional and with the use of digital means-, to transnotations and transcriptions on staff, and to musicological analyses of the cycle. We will focuss on the last piece of the cycle, the so-called anagrammatism Adam ananeoutai, by St John Koukouzeles, the most outstanding Byzantine composer (ca. 1270- before 1340).

The musical examples will be interpreted by members of the Study Group ‘Chrysorrhemon’, and of the Byzantine Women Choir ‘St Anysia’ from the Greek Society for Music Education

Music Theatre, as a synthesis of music, theatre, dance, technology and visual media, poses distinctive challenges for archival preservation due to the heterogeneity, ephemerality and dispersed nature of its documentation. Scores, scripts, audiovisual recordings, images, patches, scenographic elements and other artefacts are often scattered across multiple sources or partially lost, further complicated by non-standard notations, obsolete carriers and a historical lack of systematisation. These issues obscure the collaborative and process-based nature of music theatre creation—improvisatory, interpretive and intervention-driven—hindering both scholarly study and performance reactivation, thus contributing to music theatre underrepresentation within Western music-historical narratives. Focusing on music theatre created from the 1960s onwards, this research aims to safeguard the memory of artists engaged in this performative genre and to promote the international visibility of Portuguese contributions. Ultimately, it offers tools to strengthen performance preservation in institutions, support new generations of artists facing evolving technological and expressive demands, and reinforce music theatre’s place within contemporary artistic and archival discourse. This project advances an archival preservation model for music theatre works that integrates musicological, archival and digital humanities methodologies, while acknowledging their diversity and ephemerality. By aggregating all relevant materials, including supplementary and contextual documentation, the project seeks to improve archival description, enhance user search pathways, and promote a more complete understanding of the artistic ecology of each work. Based on conceptual models such as RIC-CM, Dublin Core, CIDOC-CRM, and the DOREMUS ontology, it develops a conceptual modeling approach capable of representing the complex collaborative practices of music theatre.

A library's primary objectives are to protect, maintain, archive, and showcase the cultural content it holds. Similar were the aims of the Manolis Kalomiris Society, founded with the purpose of “studying, disseminating, and promoting the work of the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris, with the goal of making it more widely known in Greece and abroad.”

For forty consecutive years, the Society established, managed, and developed the Kalomiris Archive as best it could -through cataloguing, score editing, concerts, recordings, small exhibitions, conferences, researcher support, and a dedicated website-working within the financial and spatial limitations it faced.

With its incorporation in 2021 into the Greek Music Archive of the Music Library of Greece of the Friends of Music Society, the Kalomiris Archive now resides alongside many of the composer’s artistic peers and contemporaries. Since then, the use and development of this diverse and significant cultural content has been radically transformed.

Using the Kalomiris Archive as a case study, this presentation examines how management structures (governance models, policies, decision-making processes, legal frameworks, etc.), together with preservation conditions and specialized staff, influence an archive’s use, transform its dynamics, and shape its outreach and impact on the community.

The former E. Czeppe Music Archive, long notorious among Viennese music archivists as an repository of significant materials, presents a rare test case for contemporary collection management and music information provision. After decades of restricted access due to storage and ownership conditions, the nearly 20,000-item collection, centered on nineteenth-century Viennese dance and popular music, entered public stewardship in 2023 when it was transferred to the Historical Music Collections of the University for Continuing Education Krems.

Preliminary sampling undertaken ahead of a complete inventory has revealed substantial research potential. The holdings document, with unusual breadth, the working repertoire and performance practice of a Kapellmeister active in the tradition of the major Viennese entertainment orchestras. They also include numerous unique first editions by members of the Strauss family, among them the only known source of orchestral parts for Sinngedichte, op. 1 (Pietro Mechetti, Vienna 1845), by Johann Strauss (1825–1899).

The relocation of the archive to a university research center rather than to a music archive raises a series of methodological and strategic questions. Should the processing of the collection prioritize the reconstruction of Kapellmeister practice and collecting activity, or the philological and repertorial value of sources that can significantly advance research on the still insufficiently studied repertoire of Viennese dance and popular music? Furthermore, how should user requests and digitization be addressed within an institutional framework marked by acute financial constraints? This paper offers a case study for examining the challenges universities face when assuming responsibility for major musical collections in times of pronounced austerity.

Annotated performance scores make up a significant portion of conservatory library collections, yet they are rarely described in ways that reveal their pedagogical, historical, or research value. Although these materials contain evidence of teaching practices, violin-school traditions, and evolving interpretive approaches, they are often catalogued as ordinary copies, leaving their informational and archival significance difficult for performers and researchers to identify. This paper presents a library-centered study of forty annotated violin scores(romantic era) from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music library, with the goal of developing models for more intentional management of these holdings.

The study employs a structured documentation method that records different types of interpretations such as fingerings and bowing. These observations are used to assess weaknesses in existing cataloguing practices and to propose enhancements to descriptive metadata, including annotation indicators and controlled vocabularies for performance-related markings. Special attention is given to how these materials contribute to provenance documentation and to the potential for designating annotated scores as a unified archival subcollection within conservatory libraries.

The findings also guide practical decisions in collection management. For example, they help determine which annotated scores should be prioritized for digitization, how to capture both faint and heavily layered marginalia clearly, and how libraries might better support performers seeking materials with specific pedagogical or technical features.

By treating annotated violin scores as materials that warrant detailed description and thoughtful preservation, this paper offers librarians a practical model for integrating performance annotations into cataloguing policy, archival practice, and user-focused services.

Although the digitization of humanities materials in Japan has progressed through platforms like JapanSearch, archives specialized in music scores remain limited. As a result, these scores are often obscured within vast collections of "Japanese classical books." Retrieving these materials is challenging due to bibliographic inconsistencies and the polysemy of the keyword "Fu" (譜), which denotes musical scores but also refers to non-musical records such as genealogies. Additionally, complex SPARQL queries attempting to filter these specific materials frequently result in timeouts.
This research aims to enhance the findability and accessibility of resources by systematically extracting musical scores from insufficient metadata. The methodology combines broad data collection via SPARQL with precise filtering in a local Python environment. First, materials containing the term "Fu" were aggregated to ensure comprehensive coverage. This was followed by local filtering to eliminate noise and identify relevant items.
Analysis revealed that approximately 13% of the materials containing "Fu" were actual musical scores. By leveraging metadata beyond titles and labels, the study also successfully extracted "hidden scores"—materials lacking "Fu" in their titles. These items accounted for 1.2% of the results and would likely have been overlooked by simple keyword searches. Furthermore, this study identifies the instruments corresponding to musical scores based on metadata descriptions, thereby contributing to the further enrichment of metadata.

Raven Chacon is a Diné (Navajo) composer, musician, and artist. He received degrees in both fine arts from the University of New Mexico and in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2022, he became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music.

For Raven Chacon, scores are attempts to go beyond the limits of classical notation systems. In the composer’s words, “the limits of that [classical] written system cannot relay the information of the complex keys and modes of the sung Native voice, nor the fluidity of time inherent in Indigenous musics.” In Chacon’s vision, “a graphic score can resist the history of Western notation.” In fact, many of Chacon’s written compositions are at the confluence between scores that facilitate performance, and visual artwork, which are presented as the work itself. Using lines, circles, arrows, and dots as musical notation, the composer offers freedom to the performer and enables paths of agency to be acknowledged and celebrated. By interpreting these scores, performers are invited “to better understand where they have been and where they are headed, and to consider all the sites of conflict they are placed between.”

From a cataloger’s perspective, classifying Chacon’s works can cause a bit of a conundrum, as many of them can be both scores and/or works of art. This presentation will analyze the compositional output of Raven Chacon and discuss various cataloging procedures and options that can be applied to make it discoverable in a bibliographic environment.

This paper aims to give an overview of the most extensive music collections held in the National Library of Greece (NLG), which congregate documents about and music of major and minor composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries from Greece and abroad, and to evaluate their significance for music historiography of the same period.

Light is shed on the Motsenigeio Historical Archive of Neohellenic Music, the Music Collection of the Royal Library Archive (during George I’s reign (1863-1913)), and the Music Archive of Dimitrios Levidis (1885 or 1886-1951). The first archive is an autonomous entity, meticulously organized by its creator, that incorporates extensive material of various types (music scores, 19th-century manuscripts of Byzantine music, documents, photos, books, and various objects). The second one consists of homogeneous material (musical scores in handwritten and printed form) that requires diligent research in the documentation process, while the Levidis’ archive (the 1/3 of the composer’s archive) is connected with archival material that is housed in BnF (Paris) and in the American School of Classical Studies (Athens).

Each one of the archives, according to its specific characteristics, extent, and limitations, requires distinct methods of handling and correlates with different chronological and geographical areas. Issues of both music librarianship (recording, documentation, interrelationships with other archives and institutions), and musicological research (musical migration, unknown music compositions, historical events emerging through musical works) are examined in connection with the presented collections.

1871 was an important year for both the Brussels and Athens Conservatoires. François-Joseph Fétis, the first director of the Brussels Conservatoire had just died, passing the torch on to François-Auguste Gevaert. This transition had a marked impact on music education in Belgium as Gevaert instated a more structured system of music education, placing more importance on theoretical classes as well as music history. In Greek music education, Athens would acquire its first and for many years only Conservatoire, founded to offer music and drama education to the Greek society. The Athens Conservatoire's goals were high from the very beginning and collaborations with other conservatories was one of the means to achieve the best results. The first two directors, Alexandros Katakouzinos and especially Georgios Nazos, who in 1890 renovated the structure of the school, kept strong relations with European conservatories, including the Brussels Conservatoire.

Through a shared interest in the modernisation of music education as well as Gevaert’s work on the music of ancient Greece, a connection formed between the two institutions.

This presentation will focus on examples of correspondence and collaboration between the Brussels and Athens Conservatoires including the selection of teaching faculty as well as the research and performance of ancient Greek music. It draws on the conservatoires’ rich archives to shed new light on a little know aspect of international cooperation.

The aim of the presentation is to present the thematic of music through the public and private archives and collections kept at the Central Service of the Greek Archives. Starting from the period of the Greek Revolution and exploring later archives of the 19th and 20th centuries, the musical formation of the modern Greek state, the introduction of European music to Greece during the period of Otto and the developments in the musical environment are captured, highlighting its multiple aspects (school, court, military, philhellenic music, etc.), through representative documents of the Service (scores, marches, hymns, musical instruments, uniforms, etc.)

closed meeting for members of the RISM International Consortium

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A recent enquiry about a puzzling retroconversion catalogue record has led to the suprising and intriguing re-discovery of a full-size paper replica piano keyboard made for Archduchess Sophie of Austria by woman composer, Teodozja Papara (1797-1873) and formerly held in the personal imperial library of Austrian Empress Elisabeth (1837–1898), known as ‘Sisi’. ​ The keyboard is beautifully presented, made of paper pasted onto card board with inside folds covered in silk brocade fabric and outside red velvet with gold tooling. The full size keyboard includes notes on notation and theory in German and Polish with some Italian. There are manuscript annotations with some hand-colouring. This item is interesting in many aspects: it was created by woman composer in Lemberg (Lwòw, Lviv) which at varying times was part of Austria-Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. Papara composed mainly piano works including tutors. The replica paper piano keyboard was part of a piano school she wrote and a more complete copy is held in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. The composer registered several patents relating to the paper piano keyboard. Research into this fascinating keyboard includes the provenance history and the use of such paper keyboard. While the keyboard was created for Archduchess Sophie who was in her early 50s at the time and less likely to have used this herself for study, it could very well have been a presentation copy which was then taken into the imperial personal library of Sisi and may have been used by her daughters.

This paper examines the role of phrase rhythm in Brahms’s late piano pieces (Opp. 116–119) and investigates how Brahms uses phrase rhythmic design to shape temporal continuity and formal direction. Recent contributions in Brahms and the Shaping of Time (2021) have drawn attention to the composer’s sensitivity to metric and temporal nuance. The present study focuses on the phrase rhythmic techniques through which this nuance takes effect.

Instead of relying only on regular spans of four and eight measures, Brahms often adjusts or reorganizes these spans through expansions, truncations, delayed completions, or by setting different patterns of phrase rhythm in contrast with one another within the same piece. These techniques shape sectional boundaries, influence the sense of momentum, and guide the unfolding of form functional relationships across the piece. Such interactions show how phrase rhythm contributes not only to local shaping but also to the long range pacing and structural coherence characteristic of Brahms’s late style.

By highlighting these strategies, the paper proposes a view of phrase rhythm as an active compositional resource rather than a passive background pattern. This perspective clarifies how adjustments to regular periodicity and the interplay of competing spans contribute to the expressive and formal trajectories of Brahms’s late piano writing.

Despite themes being a foundational unit of musical organisation and experience, critical study of thematic process has become increasingly marginalised. English composer and conductor Edward Elgar (1857-1934) associated themes with characters, landscapes, moods, and places; 'Elgar's Themes' is an interdisciplinary project employing cutting-edge digital methods to revitalise the analysis of musical themes via an online thematic catalogue. Connecting historical modes of understanding with the opportunities enabled by a fully digital environment will support a new understanding of theme as linked data, using this to integrate analysis and interpretation. Our tripartite collaboration combines: (i) a new Elgar Thematic Catalogue; (ii) a new musicology of themes and resulting ontology, building upon and connecting digital resources, including the catalogue; and (iii) production of 'digital companions', which will present case studies and explore digital sources according to the thematic ontology, repurposing data drawn from our catalogue and musicology. Across all three areas we are working towards sustainable solutions for the scholarship, data, and services we produce. This paper will first introduce the aims of the project then report on the outcomes from its first year, with a focus on our digital tooling and infrastructure. This includes the design of a thematic catalogue as the cornerstone of our digital architecture and data network, our evaluation and selection of tools and services including MEI and the RISM API, how we have used case studies to identify and prioritise functional requirements, and the realisation of our first prototype digital companion.

As the winner of the 1977 van Cliburn competition, Steven De Groote became, arguably, one of South Africa’s most successful concert pianists. Despite his short life, De Groote managed to forge a career in South Africa and abroad, becoming a part of the American music scene in the 1980s. Meaningful research into his life and career has been hampered by a lack of primary research material, since no known collection of papers is in existence. Despite this, information concerning De Groote’s life is available but scattered. Interviews, newspaper articles, photographs and a documentary of the 1977 van Cliburn competition, provided some of the primary research material used to compile a biography, providing a glimpse into De Groote’s life and career. Since he died less than fifty years ago, it is possible that more information may still come to light, since many people who knew him are still alive. In this paper, I will show how I traced De Groote’s career from its early beginnings in South Africa, to his appearances on world stages such as the Royal Albert Hall and Carnegie Hall and highlight the importance of preserving collections of individuals so that their careers and achievements can be systematically documented for future generations.

• The Arfanis Archive-Collection.

• In this paper the Arfanis Archive-Collection.

• Its creator Stathis Arfanis is a passionate music researcher and collector and had really saved from extintion important pieces of music like the ouverture of the opera “Kyra Frosini” by Pavlos Karrer

• The Arfanis archive-collection is the largest private music collection in Greece.

• It contains very rare precious documents,photographs,sheet music,recorded music and opera singers’ memorabilia .

• All those items are very impprtant historical and documentation sources about the 19th century art music history in Greece.

• The Arfanis Archive-Collection is already donated to the Athens Conservatoire; mainly because the music included is linked in various ways to the Athens Conservatoire; the latter had a significant place in the musical and social life of the 19th century Athens and Greece.

• Nowdays, the Conservatoire ‘s goal is the presentation and the protection.

• It plans via the creation of both a physical and a digital museum.

• It is a very rare, very important collection and its protection and presentation to the audience will be an invaluable token for all of us.

• Maria Glynou

• 8.12.2025

Gaetano Giani-Luporini (1936–2022) was a prominent composer from Lucca, Tuscany, active in the second half of the 20th century. He was also engaged as a painter and poet, and served as Director of the Conservatorio “Luigi Boccherini” in Lucca.

Since November 2024, his personal collection has been held in the Library of the Lucca Conservatorio; it has been donated by the composer’s widow, Professor Giovanna Morelli. It consists of musical materials such as autograph manuscripts, miscellaneous music material, full scores, vocal scores and incidental music for the stage works of Carmelo Bene. Moreover, the collection includes texts such as letters, historical essays, concert programs and notes.

Gaetano Giani-Luporini’s personal collection represents a valuable resource for musicologist and artistic researchers; it’s among the few personal collections donated to a public library soon after the composer’s death, at least in the Italian institutional landscape. Moreover, the Library of Conservatorio of Lucca also already holds the personal collection of the composer Gaetano Luporini (1865-1948), Giani-Luporini’s grandfather. The coexistence of these two family archives, combined with the activities of “Centro Studi Gaetano Giani-Luporini”, gives us the rare opportunities to research and reconstruct a detailed history of the Luporini family.

As part of my PhD in Library Science and Music Bibliography, since last year I have been engaged in arranging and cataloging the collection in the OPAC SBN (National Library System), as well as in digitizing the materials to enable research and encourage musicians and scholars to study and perform them.

Le Lac de Côme is a piano nocturne composed in 1870 by Marie Cécile Galos (Paris, 1821 – Bordeaux, 1903). Since its publication, the piece has enjoyed wide dissemination both in France and internationally. Yet, Galos herself remained largely unknown until the 21st century. Approximately thirty solo piano pieces and two works for piano and voice are preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library, most of which are digitally accessible. Considering the prominence of her best-known nocturne, the near-erasure of her identity—together with the scarcity, and frequent inconsistency, of the information available online—is striking.

This communication will present ongoing research undertaken within a PhD aimed at recovering the figure of Marie Cécile Galos—who, although celebrated in her own time, remains obscured today—and establishing a well-documented biography, alongside a critical and contextualized edition of her compositions.

Archival materials consulted at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Archives Municipales of Bordeaux and Angoulême, and the Dépôt Légal include civil records that make it possible to reconstruct her genealogy and demonstrate her belonging to an affluent family with significant influence in both Parisian and Bordelais political circles. Furthermore, press sources such as La Gironde reported positively on her music, while multiple editions issued by publishers in France, Germany, and England confirm its international reception. Additional evidence derives from piano-roll recordings of Le Lac de Côme held at the Museu de la Música de Barcelona and the Pianola Museum in Amsterdam, further attesting to the work’s broad diffusion.

The São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra (OSM) was institutionalized by law in 1949. The institutionalization process took place throughout the entire year and involved numerous agents. Musicians, councillors, and even the mayor were among the main actors recorded in the City Council Minutes on which this research is based. This paper aims to discuss the City Council Minutes not only as primary sources for uncovering historical and political processes, but also as documentary practices that shape the heritage of musical institutions.

By examining the City Council Minutes, the research identified a total of 25 sessions in which the process of institutionalizing the Orchestra was under discussion. Through these records, it was possible to observe not only how many councillors were involved (24), but also the degree to which they engaged in the debates through speeches, votes, and arguments. The entire database is publicly available through the São Paulo City Council Memory Center website.

Minutes constitute a rich type of document for understanding institutional musical heritage. They reveal how public debates framed and negotiated musical institutions, while also assembling a complex network of agents who shaped not only how music should be performed, but also which musical practices were considered worthy of political discussion. In this sense, these documents do more than register debates on matters of musical interest: they expose the political arrangements that structure and legitimize certain musical practices over others. City Council Minutes, therefore, can be understood as key supports for reflecting on policies of musical memory.

This proposal presents a lecture-recital that simultaneously operates as an arts-based research inquiry, foregrounding methodologies from a/r/tography and performance studies. As a flutist and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, I propose a program of solo flute works by composers residing in Thessaloniki, representing different generations and compositional directions, all connected to the academic and creative community of Aristotle University. This project situates the performance within a/r/tographic inquiry, a practice that interweaves the roles of artist, researcher, and teacher in a dynamic exploration of music-making, meaning, and representation. In this approach, artistic practice itself becomes a site of inquiry where embodied performance and reflective engagement generate knowledge about contemporary compositional practices and cultural contexts. A/r/tography privileges living inquiry and reflective practice, avoiding traditional research formats and instead using artistic experience as both process and outcome, thus enabling a rich interaction between performance and research. Combined with performance studies frameworks, this methodology emphasizes how the act of performance can reveal interpretive layers and communicative dimensions of musical works, situating them in broader socio-cultural discourse and offering audiences an informed encounter with contemporary artistic voices. The proposed recital incorporates contextual commentary, positioning repertoire within ongoing academic and community dialogues, and will contribute to the interdisciplinary ethos of IAML 2026 by demonstrating how arts-based research and performance can mutually inform one another. This lecture-recital features Thessaloniki-based composers Sakallieros, Papageorgiou, Maronidis, Lapidakis, Seglias, and Tsougras, from diverse generations and compositional directions, connected to the Aristotle University music community.

Repatriation, while generally understood as the return to one’s home country, specifically involves the restitution of human remains, sacred objects, and cultural materials that were removed without permission. Over the past two to three decades, as Indigenous peoples have gained greater sovereignty, the concept has expanded to encompass a critical aspect of restorative cultural justice, reconnecting source communities with their cultural heritage and supporting cultural revitalization.

In the context of sound, repatriation includes the delivery of digital copies of archival recordings or, as Seeger (2019) notes, the return of music to communities from which it had been removed due to imbalances of external power, often resulting from colonial and institutional control.

This study examines three selected sound repatriation projects, employing a comparative methodology to analyze effective practices, address legal and ethical challenges, and explore the educational potential of repatriated materials. By returning control over access, contextual interpretation, and ownership to source communities, digital repatriation helps reduce colonial influence in archives and museums (Gray 2018, Krupa & Grimm 2021).

Integrating repatriated music into education can enrich the music curriculum, fostering cultural diversity, promoting critical thinking about power and representation, and challenging ideological biases that have historically shaped music education (Regelski 2021). It also enables source communities to participate actively in shaping how their cultural materials are presented and interpreted. Sound repatriation represents not only a form of cultural justice but also a practical strategy for decolonizing archival practices, strengthening community engagement, and encouraging socially conscious approaches to teaching and learning in music.

This paper explores and sheds new light on the unfinished compositions of Michele Puccini, the father of the renowned opera composer Giacomo Puccini.

Michele Puccini (1813–1864), the fourth composer of the long-standing musical dynasty and choirmaster in Lucca, devoted most of his work to church and liturgical music and to the preservation of the musical heritage in Lucca.

He also composed two operas, a complete one, Giambattista Cattani, and the unfinished Antonio Foscarini. Nine fragments of the latter are preserved at the Musical Library of the Conservatorio Luigi Boccherini in Lucca in the Fondo Puccini, which constitutes the part of the Puccini family music collection donated by Giacomo Puccini in 1891.

These fragments were long considered to belong to a unified set of nine musical sketches. However, a cataloguing study has revealed that only four of them are actually related to Antonio Foscarini, while the remaining five constitute drafts of an as yet unknown operatic work.

Furthermore, Michele left an incomplete Mass, today in the Fondo Musica Sacra at Boccherini’s library, later finished by his brother-in-law Fortunato Magi, one of Giacomo’s early teachers.
Michele’s treatise on harmony has been lost.

After presenting the historical context and the Fondo Puccini, the paper will analyse Michele’s unfinished works from a philological and analytical point of view, aiming to understand why Michele abandoned these compositions and whether this tendency was part of his usus scribendi or rather the result of occasional circumstances.

This paper will also examine Michele Puccini’s influence on his son’s early compositions to determine how deep his impact was on Giacomo’s compositional method. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of this study is to understand if we can effectively establish a fil rouge between the two last Puccini.

Le présent exposé se propose de redécouvrir les compositions inachevées de Michele Puccini, père du célèbre compositeur Giacomo Puccini.

Michele Puccini (1813–1864) fut le quatrième compositeur et maître de chapelle d’une longue dynastie musicale lucquoise. Il consacra la plus grande partie de son activité à la composition de musique religieuse et liturgique, ainsi qu’à la préservation du patrimoine musicale de la ville.

Il écrivit également des œuvres lyriques, dont une complète, Giambattista Cattani, et une inachevée, Antonio Foscarini. De cette dernière, quatre fragments sont aujourd’hui conservés dans la bibliothèque musicale du Conservatoire Luigi Boccherini de Lucques, au sein du Fondo Puccini, une collection constituée après la donation de Giacomo Puccini lui-même d’une partie de la bibliothèque familiale en 1891.

Ces fragments ont longtemps été considérés comme appartenant à un ensemble unitaire de neuf esquisses musicales: toutefois, un travail de catalogage a révélé que seuls quatre d’entre eux se rattachent effectivement à Antonio Foscarini, tandis que les autres cinq constituent des brouillons d’une œuvre lyrique actuellement inconnue.

En outre, Michele nous a laissé une Messe incomplète, conservée dans le Fondo Musica Sacra dans la bibliothèque du conservatoire, complétée par son gendre Fortunato Magi, l’un des premiers enseignants de Giacomo: enfin, son traité d’harmonie est aujourd’hui perdu.

Après avoir présenté le contexte historique du Fondo Puccini, cette étude analysera les œuvres inachevées de Michele d’un point de vue philologique et analytique, afin d’explorer les raisons de leur abandon et de déterminer si ce modus componendi était occasionnel ou récurrent.

Elle examinera également l’influence de Michele Puccini sur les premières compositions de son fils, afin d’évaluer l’importance de son impact sur les méthodes compositionnels de Giacomo.

Enfin, l’objectif sera de déterminer s’il est possible d’établir un véritable fil rouge musical et méthodologique entre les deux représentants de la famille Puccini.

Franco Margola (1903–1990), among the foremost representatives of Italian Neoclassicism after the “Generazione Ottanta,” left an extensive corpus of nearly 800 compositions, catalogued by Ottavio De Carli in 1993, of which about 60% remains unpublished and preserved in manuscript form. The Margola Archive, housed in the Library of the “Luca Marenzio” Conservatory in Brescia, contains the entire collection entrusted by the composer’s family and constitutes a crucial resource for musicological investigation. A preliminary examination of the archive reveals the complexity of Margola’s creative process, characterized by irregular working methods, extensive preparatory sketches, multiple drafts, long-term revisions, and gaps due to lost or dispersed works. Additional materials not included in the 1993 catalogue have also emerged, together with new information drawn from archival documents, recordings, and family testimonies. This study seeks to provide an updated overview of Margola’s output by identifying the quantitative distribution of unpublished works and classifying them according to instrumentation, form, and typology. Special attention is given to fragments, incomplete compositions, dispersed sources, and elements essential for the critical reconstruction of the catalogue.The aims of the research are twofold: first, to establish the foundations for a systematic revision and expansion of Margola’s catalogue; second, to promote scholarly valorization through the preparation of critical editions, with particular focus on lesser-known repertories such as guitar works and chamber music. Ultimately, this work contributes to restoring full visibility to a key figure of twentieth-century Italian music and to exploring a substantial yet still largely unknown portion of his oeuvre.

In academic year 2024-2025 Italian Conservatories and Arts Academy start to deliver Ph.D. courses as AFAM I cicle (=XLI cicle, University): the third cicle will start in academic year 2026-2027.
In this frame seventeen Italian Conservatories organized the joint Ph.D. course of national interest “Artistic Research on Musical Heritage”, leader Institution the Conservatory of musica ‘A. Steffani’, Castelfranco Veneto (Treviso).

The Ph.D. course includes ten interconnected curricula devoted to different areas of interest: three of them are focused on music sources valorisation: Bibliography and Library Information science (Bbm), Protection of music heritage (Tpm), Music history and musical philology (Sfm). New technologies is the focus of Immersive Technologies Applied to Music (Tim), Sound creative arts (Acs), New musical languages (Nlm) curricula. Music interpretation and performing arts (Imap), Music pedagogy and teaching (Pdm), Music therapy and neuroscience (Mtn), Performance &Audience (Pau) cover different areas.

The first part of the poster describes the “Music Bibliography and Information science” curriculum (Bbm): its aims and features within Digital Humanities, the role of Supervisors, opportunities to study abroad for incoming and outcoming students, the relationships with other curricula, as well as relationships with co-funding sponsor organizations as RILM, Ente Luglio Musicale Trapanese.

The second part presents projects of Ph. D. doctoral students, at their second year, here quoted as delegates authors of the poster. Handouts will be given.

“Artistic Research on Musical Heritage”: https://conscfv.it/conservatorio/dottorati/. General coordinator: prof. Paolo Troncon. Library and Information science curriculum coordinator: Federica Riva.

n/a

In the military facilities of Hellenic Army Band of Athens (HABA) there is a music archive, which includes works: for philharmonic orchestra, for small wind ensembles, and for various music ensembles. Also contains vinyl records/CDs, concert programs, posters, and books about music theory or methods for learning instruments.

Until 2020 the structure of the archive did not follow International Cataloguing Principles (ICP), but was organized into categories in alphabetical order. The archive officer did not necessarily have knowledge of archival - librarianship or musicology.

During the pandemic period, when music activities were minimized, an appropriate opportunity was given to appoint an officer with a master's degree in musicology as archivist.

Due to the large volume of the archive, it was deemed necessary to appoint a second associate, who is a graduate of the Department of Archival, Library and Information Studies (University of West Attica).

The attempt was made to organize the archive according to the cataloging rules derived from the science of Archival - Librarianship, taking into account musicological criteria, which are necessary due to the specificity of the archive.

In the present announcement we will present for the first time the way in which the music archive of the Hellenic Army Band of Athens (HABA) is organized and operated, with the aim of demonstrating its specificity, which results from the dual (musical and military) nature of its documents.

Abstract:

The ‘Spyros Motsenigos’ Historical Archive of Neo-Hellenic Music, housed at the National Library of Greece (NLG) since 1971, is a landmark resource for the study of Neo-Hellenic music. This joint presentation outlines an ongoing project to establish physical and intellectual control over the collection following its transfer to the Special Collections Department in 2022. The first part aims to highlight the collection in its entirety, along with the work undertaken for its appraisal and updated arrangement. In accordance with their provenance and original order, materials had been organised into two series and six subseries or thematic categories; through indicative examples from each section, an attempt is made to present each thematic category along with finding tools and indexes created to access these diverse types of material. The second part transitions to the specialized documentation of the musical scores—a phase currently in progress—involving the systematic cataloguing of approximately 1,800 works by Greek and international composers, primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries. This phase also includes the creation of detailed metadata following international archival and musicological standards, authority control for composers and works, and preparation for future digitization to enhance accessibility.

Résumé :

Les Archives Historiques de Musique Néo-Hellénique « Spyros Motsenigos », conservées à la Bibliothèque Nationale de Grèce (BNG) depuis 1971, constituent une ressource emblématique pour l'étude de la musique néo-hellénique. Cette présentation conjointe expose un projet en cours visant à établir le contrôle physique et intellectuel de la collection, suite à son transfert au Département des Collections Spéciales en 2022. La première partie vise à mettre en valeur la collection dans son intégralité, ainsi que les travaux entrepris pour son évaluation et son classement mis à jour. Conformément à leur provenance et à leur ordre original, les documents avaient été organisés en deux séries et six sous-séries ou catégories thématiques ; à travers des exemples indicatifs de chaque section, nous tentons de présenter chaque catégorie thématique ainsi que les outils de recherche et les index créés pour accéder à ces divers types de documents. La deuxième partie aborde la documentation spécialisée des partitions musicales — une phase en cours — impliquant le catalogage systématique d'environ 1 800 œuvres de compositeurs grecs et internationaux, datant principalement des XIXe et XXe siècles. Cette phase comprend également la création de métadonnées détaillées selon les normes archivistiques et musicologiques internationales, le contrôle d'autorité pour les compositeurs et les œuvres, ainsi que la préparation d'une numérisation future afin de renforcer l'accessibilité.

Mots-clés : Archive Spyros Motsenigos, Archive historique de musique Νéo-Ηellénique « Spyros Motsenigos », Bibliothèque Νationale de Grèce, normes musicologiques, traitement archivistique.

The curation and presentation of musical archives in Performance Centers/Concert Halls, constitutes a rapidly evolving field at the intersection of museology, musicology, performativity and digital humanities. Music Halls/ Performance Centers today are not merely places of music performance and repositories of material cultural heritage (libraries, musical instruments), but increasingly function as multisensory sites of experience, where sound—and music in particular—plays a central role in shaping narratives and identities (Binter, 2022; Macdonald, 2006) through exhibition performance. The diffusion of the musical data and the transformation of static archives into dynamic experiential narratives and exhibitional performances, accessible through technologically mediated forms of engagement is a new challenge.

The field of digital museology emphasizes on a conceptual shift from what is exhibited to how it is experienced (Parry, 2007). Within this framework, the archive becomes a kind of performance, a living entity, embedded within dialogic forms of storytelling that combine sound, image, language, and motion, producing multimodal knowledge—meaning, knowledge not limited to visual cognition (Cameron & Kenderdine, 2007). Musical archives, when presented audiovisually in a Music Hall, activate the cultural, and emotional memory of the visitor (Bijsterveld, 2013).

Case study the exhibition of the Institute of Greek Music Heritage (IEMK) at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall (2026) “Musicians of the 20^th century in Thessaloniki”. This project represents a model case of the convergence between music archives and (digital) exhibition performance.

In this context, the archives are performed and re-context-ualized, embodying the very essence of public humanities and digital cultural heritage scholarship.

forthcoming

This paper advances a systematic examination of academic work on Cypriot musical culture documented in Greek universities between 1971 and 2025. Drawing on undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral theses from departments of Music Studies (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Macedonia, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and the Hellenic Mediterranean University), the study reconstructs the thematic, methodological, and historiographical contours of this dispersed corpus.

The research identifies recurrent domains of inquiry urban musical life, traditional repertoires and organology, vernacular poetry and performance practices, ritual and customary contexts, profiles of Cypriot composers and performers, and music-educational perspectives highlighting how these studies collectively contribute to the documentation of Cyprus’ musical past and present. A chronological reading reveals the evolution of research priorities, from historically oriented and philological approaches of the 1990s to broader ethnomusicological, cultural, and pedagogical orientations in more recent decades.

At the same time, the survey exposes significant lacunae: limited engagement with contemporary creative practices, digital and audiovisual heritage, sound archives, diasporic and intercultural musical communities, and technological or practice-based methodologies. Issues of access and bibliographical coherence are equally pronounced, since many theses remain inconsistently catalogued, insufficiently digitised, or difficult to trace across institutional repositories.

The paper argues for the establishment of a unified Cypriot Music Research Database, grounded in robust metadata standards and archival protocols. Such an initiative would enhance scholarly visibility, ensure bibliographical continuity, and align Cypriot music studies with international documentation and preservation frameworks supported by IAML.

This presentation aims to showcase two musical collections from Ottoman Greeks that are currently housed in Athens, Greece. The first is from Konstantinos A. Psachos (1869–1949), an Ottoman Greek musicologist from Istanbul who moved to Athens in 1903 to found the first School of Byzantine and Ecclesiastical Music at the Athens Conservatory. The second is from Nilea Kamarados (1847–1922), another Ottoman Greek musicologist who lived in Istanbul. Psachos’s collection remains a private archive, while Kamarados’s collection is part of the Greek Music Archive at the Music Library of Greece, "Lilian Voudouri." Both collections contain publications related to Byzantine and Greek folk music; manuscripts of compositions from both genres in the New Method of Byzantine notation, European staff notation, and Hampartsum notation; prints from their time; general bibliographies; drafts of their works; and correspondence. They also contain a significant number of Ottoman and Turkish folk music compositions written in manuscripts using the aforementioned notational systems, as well as published editions of these genres.The last testimonies are responsible for both collections becoming part of the Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae Project and being included in its online catalog. In addition to bridging musical archives, the project is also bridging different ethnoreligious communities by studying Ottoman Turkish music from the perspectives of not only Ottoman Turkish-speaking Muslim musicians but also Ottoman Armenians and Ottoman Greeks. It is known and proven that two Ottoman Greek musicologists collaborated and communicated continuously with each other and with other musicians of the Ottoman Empire. This can be traced through their archives, testimonies, and joint transcriptions. This presentation will discuss these aspects.

The announcement in August 2024 that Finale—the industry-standard notation software for over three decades—would cease development immediately, signaled a paradigm shift for the preservation of born-digital music. This paper presents findings from a comparative study of Greek art music composers, analyzing data from two distinct survey periods: pre-discontinuation 2019 (n=41) and post-discontinuation 2025 (n=51). By employing a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative usage metrics with qualitative assessment of archival practices, we quantify the systemic risks of "digital oblivion" facing contemporary cultural heritage.

Our research reveals a digitally mature community where the use of notation software has reached saturation stability: approximately 78% of composers employ digital scores as their principal compositional tool, a figure virtually unchanged since 2019. However, this high adoption rate masks a severe preservation crisis: for composers relying on Finale, over 90% of their total creative output is stored exclusively in proprietary Finale format. Alarmingly, for half of these respondents (median), 100% of their life’s work is locked in this now-obsolete ecosystem.Despite this, awareness of "vendor lock-in" remains low. Only 37% recognize this dependency as a significant threat, and resistance involves high friction: ~40% of active Finale users have no plans to migrate.

We argue that the "Finale crisis" warns of the obsolescence threatening born-digital archives. Dependence on proprietary ecosystems poses a systemic risk. The paper proposes that music libraries must evolve from passive collectors to active preservation hubs, advocating for software-agnostic literacy and mandating open standards to prevent inaccessible scores.

University orientation can be an overwhelming experience. The near constant barrage of information can make it hard for library orientation to make a meaningful and lasting impression on incoming undergraduate students.

Using library orientation escape rooms created at Rupert Edwards Library (REL) in fall 2024 and University of Toronto Music Library (UTML) in 2025 as case studies, this presentation explores the concept of escape rooms and their application as library orientation activities to introduce students to the library space, underutilized materials, and staff in a memorable manner, while reducing “library anxiety.” It also considers the pedagogical value of an immersive game experience to encourage a flow state of learning, increasing student engagement and retention of library skills, materials, and etiquette.

This presentation then outlines the process of design, testing, and implementation of developing an escape room with special attention given to practical considerations for facilitation and repeatability. Drawing on informal participant feedback and post-game observations, it compares how escape room orientation can be adapted across different spaces, and collection sizes, and audiences, discussing the challenges and opportunities encountered to date.

Our institutional repositories (IR) serve to document an institution’s scholarly and creative output, provide access to knowledge for those inside and outside the institution, and preserve knowledge. Hosting recordings (both audio and video) of student recitals in academic institutional repositories intersects with thorny issues of copyright, including public performance and streaming rights, Open Access, the Public Domain, and Fair Use/Fair Dealing. For example, online access to these recordings through repositories can lead to exorbitant licensing fees and unintended impacts on student repertoire for what is often the culmination project of their studies. Further, IRs are often operating in undefined spaces with little precedent for guidance and some have limited technology capabilities or staff. Based on a survey of United States institutions, this presentation lays out how IR administrators in libraries and archives are managing intersections of copyright, access, and preservation. Major challenges include claims risk management, academic unit engagement, improving accessibility of student-created performance media, and educational efforts about fair use, attribution, and creator’s rights. We hope that sharing these varied practices can inspire institutions to more thoughtfully design their repository programs for multimedia—protecting the institution from liability, making content more accessible, and educating students and faculty about repertoire, library collections, and copyright.

Helmut Kallmann (1922–2012) and John Beckwith (1927–2022) stand as two of the most influential figures in Canadian music scholarship. Kallmann, the inaugural head of the Music Division at the National Library of Canada, authored the landmark A History of Music in Canada 1534–1914 (1960) and co-edited the first music encyclopedia published in Canada, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (EMC, first edition 1981). Beckwith, founding director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Canadian Music, published and lectured extensively on Canadian musical culture and was one of the three driving forces behind the creation of the EMC, to which he also contributed numerous entries. These brief sketches offer only a glimpse of the scope and significance of their enduring work in Canadian music research, documentation, and advocacy.

In 2025, the University of Toronto Music Library acquired two significant archival collections that illuminate the decades-long personal and professional exchange between these two scholars: Beckwith’s print and email correspondence with and about Kallmann (1951–2018), and Kallmann’s print correspondence with Beckwith (1956–2004).

This paper will situate each body of correspondence within its respective archival fonds while bringing their letters into conversation with one another. By examining how these documents trace their shared interests, collaborations, and reflections on Canadian music, the paper will highlight the scholarly value of their dialogue and demonstrate how it enriches our understanding of their published works on Canada’s musical heritage.

The annual 90 minute session sponsored by the Répertoire international de la presse musicale (RIPM). Presenters and topics for the two additional papers to be announced soon.

Round Table

IMS Study Group “Music of the Christian East and Orient” and Study Group "Psaltike" of the Levi Foundation in Venice

This Round Table will investigate the manuscript world of Eastern Christian Chant in its various traditions (Byzantine, Slavonic, Romanian, Armenian a.o.), looking gratefully back at what has been accomplished in creating the basic instrumenta studiorum (manuscript inventories, catalogues, and databases of different types) and reflecting on developmental lines for the years to come.

More precisely, we will refer a. to the existent catalogues, with emphasis on the publications since 2000, analyzing the different approaches in the cataloguing work, b. to various attempts of numbering the pieces of the old Byzantine repertories (e.g the numbering of the stichera according to the Standard Abridged Version a.o.), c. to digitalized chant-manuscripts collections, d. to projects of searching sources and their metadata, e. to ongoing/future projects connected to chant manuscripts in the context of digital humanities.

The Round Table will also explore possibilities for greater interconnection between the codicological and paleographical study of eastern Christian chant and historically informed performance practices and music education in the contemporary world. To this end, some recent works will be mentioned, along with a reference to ongoing projects on the subject, such as the Encoding of eastern neumatic notations (MEI initiative), the revival of old performance practices through multidisciplinary research, along with their benefits for music education.

Since 1936, a significant number of discographies have been compiled, which can serve as secondary sources for further discographic research. But how do we know that the data in a discography are reliable? What are the criteria for the reliability of discographies? This topic has been a concern for some discographers since the 1970s. Tim Brooks’ 1996 proposal to apply the reference system of scientific publications to discographies points to the methodological issue that, while references were not needed for the first discographies, following the principle of ’first to do it’, this is no longer acceptable for today’s discographers especially when using earlier discographies as sources. Brooks’ call has provoked sharp criticism from parts of the discographic community, arguing that the extensive referencing of discographic data sets not only overloads the data but also increases printing costs enormously.

For an online published discography, this problem can be solved in several ways. In addition, it would now in principle be possible to compile a universal discography from the set of national discographies, with practical display, search and access options. However, there appear to be a number of obstacles to the creation of a global discographic database. Some of the obstacles are financial and IT-related, while others are methodological, such as the issue of standardisation or the fact that some national discographies have not yet been completed.

I will discuss these two challenges of discography, the reliability of discographies and the issues of a global discography, using literature and international examples.

This paper presents the first systematic census of wind-band manuscript collections preserved in the province of Messina, focusing on holdings in Castroreale and Novara di Sicilia and neighbouring centres with long but poorly documented band traditions. These corpora, often unevenly conserved and transmitted, represent a crucial yet overlooked layer of Sicilian musical culture whose recovery reshapes local soundscapes from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The project combines archival fieldwork, codicological description, and stylistic analysis with a cataloguing workflow aligned with Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale standards, enabling manuscripts to enter the SBN authority and bibliographic environment and to be discovered alongside printed repertories. Emphasis is placed on identifying copyists, reconstructing arrangement practices, and tracing the circulation of marches, processional pieces, paraphrases, and operatic potpourris across towns. A further goal is the inclusion of these materials within a IIIF-compliant digital repository, allowing the virtual reunification of dispersed collections and facilitating the comparison of variants, performance annotations, and layers of use. Data judged relevant will also be shared with RISM to ensure international visibility and to promote further scholarly valorization. Such an infrastructure supports historically informed revivals of neglected repertories, offering conductors, community ensembles, and conservatory groups access to sources otherwise unavailable. By defining a research protocol and a preservation framework, the census proposes a scalable model for mapping wind-band manuscript heritage in other Italian provinces and positions the Messina case as a key observatory on local craftsmanship, civic ritual, and band culture in the central Mediterranean.

Cette communication présente le premier recensement systématique des collections manuscrites pour harmonie conservées dans la province de Messine, en se concentrant sur les fonds de Castroreale et de Novara di Sicilia ainsi que sur ceux de centres voisins dotés de traditions bandistiques anciennes mais peu documentées. Ces corpus, souvent conservés et transmis de manière inégale, représentent une strate cruciale mais négligée de la culture musicale sicilienne, dont la redécouverte permet de reconfigurer les paysages sonores locaux entre la fin du XIXe siècle et le milieu du XXe siècle. Le projet associe enquête archivistique de terrain, description codicologique et analyse stylistique à un flux de catalogage conforme aux normes du Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale, permettant aux manuscrits d’entrer dans l’environnement d’autorité et bibliographique du SBN et d’être repérés aux côtés des répertoires imprimés. Une attention particulière est accordée à l’identification des copistes, à la reconstitution des pratiques d’arrangement et au suivi de la circulation de marches, de pièces processionnelles, de paraphrases et de pot-pourris d’opéra entre différentes localités. Un autre objectif est l’intégration de ces matériaux dans un dépôt numérique compatible avec IIIF, afin de permettre la réunification virtuelle de collections dispersées et de faciliter la comparaison des variantes, des annotations d’exécution et des différentes strates d’usage. Les données jugées pertinentes seront également partagées avec le RISM, afin d’en garantir la visibilité internationale et de favoriser de nouvelles formes de valorisation scientifique. Une telle infrastructure soutient des reprises historiquement informées de répertoires négligés, en offrant aux chefs, aux ensembles communautaires et aux groupes de conservatoire un accès à des sources autrement indisponibles. En définissant à la fois un protocole de recherche et un cadre de préservation, ce recensement propose un modèle évolutif pour cartographier le patrimoine manuscrit des harmonies dans d’autres provinces italiennes et fait du cas messinois un observatoire privilégié de l’artisanat local, du rituel civique et de la culture bandistique en Méditerranée centrale.

Dieser Beitrag präsentiert die erste systematische Bestandsaufnahme von Handschriftensammlungen für Blaskapellen, die in der Provinz Messina aufbewahrt werden, mit besonderem Augenmerk auf die Bestände in Castroreale und Novara di Sicilia sowie in benachbarten Orten mit langen, jedoch nur unzureichend dokumentierten Kapellentraditionen. Diese Korpora, die häufig in ungleicher Weise überliefert und erhalten sind, stellen eine zentrale, bislang jedoch übersehene Schicht der sizilianischen Musikkultur dar, deren Erschließung die lokalen Klanglandschaften vom späten 19. bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts neu konturiert. Das Projekt verbindet archivische Feldforschung, kodikologische Beschreibung und stilistische Analyse mit einem Katalogisierungsworkflow, der an den Standards des Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale ausgerichtet ist. Dadurch können die Handschriften in das Normdaten- und bibliographische Umfeld des SBN integriert und zusammen mit gedruckten Repertoires recherchierbar gemacht werden. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Identifizierung von Kopisten, der Rekonstruktion von Bearbeitungspraktiken sowie der Nachverfolgung der Zirkulation von Märschen, Prozessionsstücken, Paraphrasen und Opernpotpourris zwischen verschiedenen Orten. Ein weiteres Ziel ist die Einbindung dieser Materialien in ein IIIF-konformes digitales Repositorium, das die virtuelle Wiedervereinigung verstreuter Sammlungen ermöglicht und den Vergleich von Varianten, Aufführungsannotationen und Gebrauchsschichten erleichtert. Als relevant beurteilte Daten werden zudem mit dem RISM geteilt, um internationale Sichtbarkeit zu gewährleisten und eine weiterführende wissenschaftliche Erschließung zu fördern. Eine solche Infrastruktur unterstützt historisch informierte Wiederaufführungen vernachlässigter Repertoires, indem sie Dirigenten, lokalen Ensembles und Konservatoriumsgruppen Zugang zu Quellen verschafft, die sonst nicht verfügbar wären. Indem die Bestandsaufnahme sowohl ein Forschungsprotokoll als auch einen Erhaltungsrahmen definiert, schlägt sie ein skalierbares Modell für die Kartierung des handschriftlichen Blaskapellenerbes in anderen italienischen Provinzen vor und positioniert den Fall Messina als ein zentrales Beobachtungsfeld für lokales Handwerk, bürgerliches Ritual und Blasmusikkultur im zentralen Mittelmeerraum.

In addition to housing over 700,000 individually cataloged items, the Cook Music Library at Indiana University Bloomington is also home to over 100 special collections. These collections have accumulated in the library over the course of almost 60 years, during which time description standards for archival materials have evolved exponentially. This, combined with the lack of a dedicated archivist position for most of the library’s history, had resulted in an immense backlog of un- or under-described collections. And, for the few collections that were described, the format and quality of those descriptions varied widely from now-defunct standalone websites to collection-level and item-level bibliographic records of inconsistent quality.

Efforts to address this inconsistent archival description landscape are underway on multiple fronts through numerous collaborations within the Cook Music Library. These efforts include establishing a standard for minimum-level archival description through preliminary finding aids, converting information from outdated finding aid documents and websites into ArchivesSpace, and creating collection-level catalog records from published ArchivesSpace finding aids to combat information silos. This presentation will touch on the history of special collections at the Cook Music Library, the state of these ongoing efforts, and potential next steps, including an exploration into the possibility of automated finding aid to catalog record conversions.

LIMTI open working meeting, followed by Electronic Score Licensing Project Group open working meeting.

open to all, but intended primarily for active RISM contributors

Linked RISM is a prototype environment for experimenting with the RISM data as Linked Open Data. Developed as part of the RISM Online initiative, we have been gradually updating and improving this service as we move towards making it a publicly available and fully supported resource, delivered by the RISM Digital Center.

While it may be broadly known that RISM Online has a publicly available, machine-readable API, it is less known that the data from this API, delivered as JSON-LD, can be automatically transformed into Linked Data formats using purpose-built JSON-LD context documents. We have built our Linked RISM project around this functionality. We harvest the linked data from the public RISM Online APIs in the n-triple format, and subsequently load these triples into our own instance of Qlever, a Linked Data search engine (https://github.com/ad-freiburg/qlever). Incremental improvements to the RISM Online API and the JSON-LD context are reflected in improvements to the exported data. A SPARQL query interface is available at https://linked.rism.io/rism for querying the data. Currently we have over 91 million triples in this dataset, representing all of the primary record types available in RISM: Sources, People, Institutions, Incipits, Holdings and Works.

In this talk we will cover the current state of Linked RISM, the process of requesting and working with the Linked Data in RISM Online, a short overview of our SPARQL endpoint and its capabilities, and discuss the future of this effort, with an open invitation to try the service and provide feedback.

Digital music editions increasingly require data models that can represent interconnected historical, bibliographic, and analytical information. Traditional relational database management systems, while effective for structured and well-bounded datasets, often limit the expression of complex relationships and cross-repository connections that musicological inquiry depends on. This presentation will be thus exploring how knowledge graphs offer a more adaptable foundation for navigating and contextualizing music information in digital editions.

Building on ongoing discussions in music librarianship and digital musicology, the talk will demonstrate how RDF and Linked Data principles have supported the integration of heterogeneous assets such as descriptive metadata, concordances, editorial workflow information, and external references within the context of the E-LAUTE music edition. Practical attention will be given to transforming tabular datasets into triples, and to designing dereferenceable URIs that make digital edition content discoverable beyond its own original platform.

The presentation will further contrast relational and graph approaches by showing how the latter enable the formulation of musicological competency questions that rely on traversing relationships—such as identifying networks of people, places, sources, or transmission paths. It will also shed light on provenance documentation as a means of ensuring transparency in editorial and data-processing activities. Together, all these strategies will hopefully prove that knowledge graphs can be a powerful infrastructure for future-oriented digital music edition environments.

SLUB Dresden has been providing a central infrastructure for recording music events with Musiconn Performance for ten years. The database contains data from around 20 research projects, with the most recent covering the repertoire of all German symphony orchestras between 1949 and 2024. This presentation will report on the experiences of the infrastructure project, the numerous innovations in the database, and the challenges and plans for the coming years. It will also seek international cooperation opportunities.

The paper presents the history of the Croatian branch of IAML—the Croatian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centers (HUMKAD)—as well as the current activities of the branch. The first Croatian contact with IAML was established in the late 1960s through the participation of Croatian representatives in the Yugoslav National RILM Committee.

Contact continued in the 1990s via individual enthusiastic music librarians with IAML representatives. During that period, the first Croatian delegates attended international IAML congresses and British branch study weekends, even before the official founding of the Croatian branch in 2004. Today, the Croatian branch of IAML has 15 individual members from 11 institutions—public, school, and university libraries, scientific institutes, and music information centers—from Zagreb, Karlovac, Zadar, and Rijeka. The branch activities include education of staff and users of various music collections, promoting the importance of music collections and musical heritage, and contributing to the preservation of printed, manuscript, and recorded music material. Members participate in annual IAML conferences (within budget constraints). The association also strives to attract new members from other regions of Croatia. The paper presents the association's activities through important projects related to the work of significant individuals (Franjo Ksaver Kuhač, Boris Papandopulo), professional assemblies (round table Subject Indexing in Music), virtual exhibitions (Mountains as Composer’s Inspiration, Animals in Music), lectures, and regular and topical activities (Croatian National Book Day, Books Night, Free Music Antiquarian Book/Sheet Music Sale, commemorating significant anniversaries).

In 2025, after 14 years of hiatus, the 8th issue of Biblioteka Muzyczna. Music Library, the periodical of the Music Libraries Section of the Polish Librarians’ Association - the Polish National Branch of IAML - was published. Its release came at a special moment, as 2024 marked the Section’s 60th anniversary. This jubilee provided an excellent opportunity to refresh the journal’s format and to transition from a traditional printed edition to a fully electronic version.

The presentation aims to outline the history of Biblioteka Muzyczna. Music Library. It emerged in the late 1970s as the first and only professional bulletin for music libraries, meeting the community’s needs for information sharing, documentation, and the broader promotion of knowledge about music collections. In the following decades, it evolved from a printed publication into a fully “born-digital” journal, responding to technological developments and the expectations of its readership.

The presentation will discuss the key stages in the journal’s development, its role in fostering professional integration, the themes and structure of its content and its significance within the broader context of IAML’s activities. The analysis of the history of Biblioteka Muzyczna. Music Library will demonstrate how the shift in medium affects the preservation of its informational and documentation mission in the digital era.

This paper examines the Russian dimension of the life and work of Vladimir Mikhailovich Fedorov (1901–1979), a French musicologist and one of the founders of IAML. Fedorov was born and grew up in Russia. His father was a prominent political figure and involved in the anti-Bolshevik resistance. At eighteen, Vladimir left Russia with his family and settled in Paris. There, he completed his education and joined French musical circles while keeping strong ties with the Russian émigré community. Throughout his life, he maintained a deep interest in Russian music, reflected in his publications and work in international music organizations.

Archival collections in Russia shed light on these connections. In the early 1930s, Fedorov studied Mussorgsky and corresponded with Pavel Lamm, editor of the composer’s Complete Works. From the mid-1950s, he played an important role in connecting Soviet musicology with international projects such as RILM and RISM, establishing professional contacts in Moscow and Leningrad. The largest body of archival material consists of his letters to musicologists Grigory Shneerson (1901–1982) and Vasily Kiselev (1902–1975). These letters reveal the character of professional exchange and the challenges of international cooperation during the Soviet period.

This paper provides an overview of these sources, preserved in the Russian National Museum of Music and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, and examines Fedorov’s role as a bridge between Russian and Western music scholarship. It highlights the significance of his efforts in linking Russian music research to global music library and archival initiatives.

The Library of the Faculty of Music preserves unique manuscripts and printed sheet music that are primarily significant for the study of Serbian music history. Some of these scores also serve as historical documents, bearing witness to the time and place of their creation, often enriched by handwritten marginal notes. This paper presents several examples from the Library’s holdings that are connected with the Thessaloniki region and thereby acquire documentary value for the study of its multicultural history.

We unfold the stories behind these scores, tracing encounters, dialogues, and influences among related cultures. From the piano composition Kolo Salonique (ca. 1900) to the Serbian quartet published in 1919, we follow the composers’ paths intersecting during the Great War. Thessaloniki and the Thessaloniki Front form the space of this creative encounter, with 1916 as the temporal focal point in which these narratives gain their full meaning.

Exactly 110 years later, in 2026, most of these compositions remain absent from concert stages. Yet their enduring importance lies in the vivid detail with which they reflect the historical events of their time and place. In this sense, the preserved scores kept in the Library of the Faculty of Music hold crucial scholarly value.

Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos (1886-1960) came to the United States in 1936 and was appointed music director of the Minneapolis Symphony orchestra the following year. During his time in the Midwest, the symphony toured agressively in neighboring states, including Iowa. In Ames, Iowa, Mitropoulos met James Dixon, (1929-2007) who would become his chief protege throughout his musical training at the University of Iowa and transition to professional gigs with the Seventh Army Symphony, New England Conservatory of Music, and the Minneapolis Symphony.

With the donation of James Dixon's papers (including the materials he inherited from Mitropoulos upon his death) to the University of Iowa in 2021, the lives of both conductors are more readily available for research and study. A vast collection of scores and more modest holdings of papers, photographs, media, and realia show the impact both Mitropoulos and Dixon had on orchestral music in the American Midwest during the 20th century.

Xenakis in Zeeland

What if the future of music was written in Zeeland decades ago — and is still audible today in a unique archive of ZB, a public library?

Composer and architect Iannis Xenakis, born from Greek parents, played a key role in the history of the New Music Festival in Zeeland. His work was heard in Middelburg from 1961, where the later Center for New Music grew into an internationally leading meeting point for contemporary music.

From the Xenakis festival in 1976, he became a permanent, defining force within the annual festival. He gave lectures and workshops in various editions and regularly composed new work especially for the musicians who performed in Zeeland.

An indispensable role in this whole is played by ZB Library of Zeeland, where a large part of the archive of the New Music Foundation is kept (scores and sound ), including recordings and released scores by Xenakis. The archive provides insight into how important Zeeland was – and is – for international avant-garde music and how Xenakis contributed to this.

The public library thus functions as the memory of more than 30 years of innovative music practice in Zeeland. By preserving and making this heritage accessible, the library ensures that the influence of Xenakis, other contemporary composers and the Festival New Music is not only captured, but also continues to live on for researchers, musicians and the public. This makes the library a link between the past and future of contemporary music in Zeeland and far beyond.

This study examines processes involved in creating a podcast series through the use of creative storytelling. The study aims to highlight research conducted on archival material preserved at the Library of the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki, supplemented by additional public and private local archives. The research focused on the lives of four musicians who taught at the conservatory during the first half of the 20th century: Alexandros Kazantzis, the institution’s first principal, along with Vasileios Theofanous, Georgios Vakalopoulos, and Epameinondas Floros. A microhistorical approach was employed, making it possible to uncover evidence that might otherwise remain overlooked, and thus revealing connections to the social and cultural environment surrounding the subject of the research. The dissemination of the study’s findings aims to connect the people of Thessaloniki with the city’s musical history and cultural life. As a result, the project is intended not only for academic audiences but also for the general public. Since art is a powerful means of communication, the study sought artistic research practices that would help share the findings more effectively and maximize their impact. Dramatic interpretive narration was chosen, as the use of theatrical techniques has emerged over the past few decades as a highly effective educational tool for showcasing both tangible and intangible cultural heritage—often raising social issues that encourage reflection and critical thinking. The project also utilized digital technologies, which offer new, interdisciplinary ways to process and enrich informational material, as well as easy and immediate access for broad audiences.

Music streaming platforms emerged with the promise of endless exploration of music catalogues from around the world from the convenience of an internet-enabled device. However, their utopian promises are far from the Western-centric infrastructures and management that underpin the music products such as playlists currently delivered by these services (Campos Valverde 2025). Leaving aside the media industries’ co-opted considerations of equality manifested via representation and visibility (Saha 2021), how can we rekindle scholarship interest in questions of cultural imperialism and global flows of music in the software-dependent streaming era? In this paper, I will mobilise Dylan Robinson’s (2020) framework of inclusionary structures of music culture and apply it to music streaming services, proposing the concept of ‘inclusionary discovery’. While Robinson’s framework of ‘hungry listening’ analyses the extractive trend of incorporating indigenous or minority musics to Western classical live performance and recording, here I will propose a broader understanding of this principle as the underlying ideology that underpins the exploration and discovery of music libraries in the streaming industry for all racialised musics as a whole. Using material collected from interface analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and industry documents, I will demonstrate how the music libraries that form the basis of recommender products, and marketing copy and PR statements emphasise the idea of discovery of music from a perceived ‘other’ in terms of geography, race, and location, which is always situated outside the Western mainstream ‘centre’. The talk will conclude suggesting alternative forms of music curation and consumption.

Maria Luiza Kfouri (1954–2023) was a Brazilian journalist and musicologist. She served as musical coordinator of Rádio Gazeta FM (1988) and as director of Rádio Cultura AM in São Paulo (1989-1995), during which time she produced several programs dedicated to Brazilian popular music. In 2005, Kfouri launched the website Discos do Brasil (Discs from Brazil) through which she made available technical information on recordings of Brazilian music. She emphasized that the website does not present the discography of Brazil, but rather a Brazilian discography shaped by a personal curatorial perspective. Initially comprising approximately 4,000 titles, the website features a sophisticated search system that allows users to locate information such as album titles, arrangers, songs, and performers, among other data. In its most recent update, in 2020, the database included 7,482 albums, and 56,017 songs. In 2023, shortly before her death, she donated her entire record collection to the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In a posthumous note published on the website, musician Arthur de Faria stated that Discos do Brasil will remain online but will no longer be updated, as, being a personal discography, it would not be appropriate to include recordings that might not align with the author’s curatorial choices. This study presents the Discos do Brasil website, highlighting its functionality and resources for researchers. It then offers a reflection on the role of collecting in the preservation and dissemination of musical heritage, engaging with perspectives from the fields of memory studies, history, and musicology.

The war in Ukraine has renewed attention to the historical conflation of Ukrainian and neighboring cultures with Russian identity. The long shadow of Russification has persisted under Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and continues to the present day. This erasure persists in library and archival metadata, limiting the visibility of musical traditions from Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, and Uyghur communities.

This presentation explores how Soviet censorship and Russian-language mandates obscured minority identities and how these patterns of bias persist in library metadata. These patterns are sustained by a cyclical relationship in which metadata both shapes and is shaped by scholarship and reference resources, including Grove, RILM, and MGG. Linked data platforms such as VIAF and Wikidata further propagate these issues, as VIAF aggregates authority data primarily from Western national libraries while excluding authority data from former Soviet countries like Armenia and Belarus, both of which have robust online authority files.

Cultural erasure is best mitigated by practices that prioritize community-centered representation. These include updating metadata with native languages and scripts, using controlled vocabularies that reflect local terminology, and enhancing archival descriptions to improve discoverability, particularly for native-language users. The importance of collaboration with scholars and publishers is evident in Grove Music Online’s recent Ukrainian music revision project. These practices can serve as a model for preserving excluded traditions. By applying reparative cataloging methods and fostering cultural sensitivity, librarians can promote authentic representation, counter historical oppression, and ensure musical heritages are accurately reflected in library collections.

This presentation will introduce the idea of the bibliographic record as a genre and will use concepts from genre theory to explore the genre’s current condition as it exists in the United States. As its authors, catalogers recognize catalog users as the genre’s readers, doing so explicitly when discussing issues like the specialized needs of users seeking music information or FRBR or LRM user tasks. In addition to authors and readers, the bibliographic record has generic qualities like social and place/time contexts, discourse communities, generic evolution, and the potential for dysfunction. This presentation will explore some of the generic qualities and functions of the American bibliographic record, with particular focus on records for music materials. It will offer suggestions for ways its authors might use pragmatic approaches to writing its texts and engage with tensions in its discourse communities, and will seek to spark a conversation on ways that discourse communities of catalogers outside the United States navigate generic evolution effectively.

The paper presents the first results of the project to develop a specialized Faceted Thesaurus of Musical Genres and Forms in accordance with ISO standards and the Italian Nuovo Soggettario methodology. The Thesaurus is organized in a hierarchical structure, with a thoroughly faceted and synthetically list of terms, which have a cross-language equivalence relationship with other Thesauri and it is designed to function as a semantic hub, supporting integrated research in library catalogues and Linked Data Environments. Furthermore, the possibility of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) will also be tested to optimize indexing and semantic enrichment. A case study is presented which describes how the Thesaurus could improve user Information Retrieval and serve as infrastructure of the research.

The Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale acquired and digitalized the Italian Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti, published between 1983 and 2005. The content is continuously expanded with new articles either updating the original lemmata or representing the new fields of music scholarship.

Short position papers by the authors of new entries on the music culture and musical life of Greece will outline their guiding principles and perspectives in developing their contributions. These presentations will be followed by an open discussion about the coverage of information in modern lexicographic work and what is their relevance concerning the presentation of the authoritative content at the time of artificial Intelligence and the other content available on open web.

• Daniela Castaldo (University of Salento / DEUMM General Co-Editor), DEUMM as a model for preservation of printed and digital music heritage
• Antonio Baldassarre (Hochschule Luzern / DEUMM General Co-Editor), Mapping Greek music and music history within the lexicographical landscape
• Aris Bazmadelis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Musical life and history of Thessaloniki and Greek Macedonia
• Chrēstos Terzēs (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien), Ancient Greek notation and instruments
• Donatella Restani (University of Bologna), Transmission and Reception of Ancient Greek Musical Knowledge in Middle and Modern Age
• Silvia Tessari (University of Padova – Levi Foundation), Byzantine music: contents and definitions in the printed DEUMM entry and in the digital new one.
• Stella Kourmpana (Athens Conservatoire), Greek music and musicians of the 19^th century
• Giorgos Sakallieros (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Greek music and musicians of the 20^th century

closed meeting for the RISM Commission Mixte and members of the RISM Board

What stories do music collections tell about our colonial past—and how can they amplify voices long overlooked? The collections of the Netherlands Music Institute were originally assembled by Hague banker Daniël François Scheurleer (1855–1927), who envisioned a library and museum offering access to diverse musical cultures—not only Western classical music, but also non-Western traditions. After Scheurleer’s death, the museum and its holdings became part of the The Hague Art Museum (now Kunstmuseum), which adopted a policy of collecting music manuscripts and documentation from musicians and composers, many of whom had ties to the former Dutch colonies.

Today, we critically examine these legacies. This presentation highlights how we confront traces of racism and exclusion—rethinking acquisition and cataloging practices, and how we embrace meerstemmigheid (multiplicity of voices) in our collection policies. We have digitized more than 12 meters of music and documentation, scheduled for publication through web catalogues in 2026. These materials range from 19th-century Atjeh War marching music scores and Sourabaya opera programs to autographs by Linda Bandára, Hector Marinus, Paul Seelig, as well as scrap albums of touring Dutch musicians and contemporary gamelan music scores. Together, they reveal complex narratives of power, identity, and cultural exchange.

Since 2021 musicologist Dr. Philomeen Lelieveldt has served as curator of the Netherlands Music Institute Collections, consisting of a music library and archive, which from 2016 have been part of the The Hague City Archives. www.nederlandsmuziekinstituut.nl

The first issue of the UMS Musical Times was published in Cape Town, South Africa, in September 1854. Regarded as the earliest South African music periodical, this ten-page handwritten document was distributed among members of the United Musical Society (UMS), established two years earlier. The contents of the first issues comprised original writings by UMS members alongside material reproduced from existing publications, often accompanied by illustrations. Three known issues of The Musical Times have survived, reproduced in a photocopied compilation by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1966. An inscription in this bound volume notes that the copies were made from manuscripts belonging to John Juritz and Percival Kirby, whose personal papers are likewise housed in UCT Special Collections. As some of the earliest written documentation of music-making in South Africa, the surviving issues of The Musical Times provide a valuable lens through which to examine 19th-century musical life in the Cape Colony, then under British rule. Most articles reflect this Western colonial sphere, concentrating on European music, composers, instruments and events. It is, however, particularly in the articles focusing on local happenings and African musics that a true glimpse into the social fabric of colonialism in the Cape Colony becomes apparent. This paper first outlines efforts to locate the original manuscripts of the surviving Musical Times, and their preservation and status within UCT Special Collections. Secondly, it examines how the periodical’s content, patronage, tone, publication format and other features reflect the colonial zeitgeist of 1850s South Africa.

Choro is a Brazilian popular music genre and practice that was created in the XIX century in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) that became national heritage in 2024. Since then, the research group Choro Patrimônio is developing the Choro Database (CD) that consists of six information categories, the same used in the technical report for the patrimonialization process: 1) Collections 2) Teaching activities, 3) Associations and popular collectives, 4) Rodas de choro and places of performances, 5) Discography 6) Research and publications. For each one of these categories there is a specific metadata set. Objective: To discuss the theoretical framework that structures the music information (MI) representation in the CD. Methodology: The project uses collaborative action research to engage musicians, valuing knowledge; the database becomes a living memory-sharing space for choro. Results: The MI representation that underpins the CD considers the relation between the Choro practice (commonly in rodas which are a traditional performance venues that takes place on the street or inside any place in a circle formation) and the social elements. In CD some metadata are descriptive and explanatory, giving space to stories, places, people in general, narratives, popular organizations and practices that contribute to the continuity of the musical heritage. This theoretical framework brings to MI representation some principles from Ethnomusicology archives, expanding the narrative of the resources for beyond the system.

Italian libraries have recently rediscovered and catalogued extensive collections of 20th-century popular music printed editions, which were saved from oblivion through legal deposit acquisitions and donations. This has sparked a "second life" of entertainment music. Considered a form of ephemera, this repertoire documents the evolution of Italian song publishing and performance practices in cabaret theaters, dance halls, public spaces, and later in music festivals, radio, cinema, and television.

These collections mainly comprise parts for small orchestras, melodies with chord symbols, as well as scores for voice and lead instrument. The covers—often created by graphic artists or featuring photographs of performers—reflect the strong ties between musical production, the cultural industry, and the publishing market. Within this context, complex authorship and copyright issues emerge, further complicated by the widespread use of pseudonyms, which makes it challenging to reconstruct the careers and identities of some creators.

Cataloguing these materials requires consulting nontraditional sources of musical information, such as the BNCF’s Bollettino, and the SIAE Archive.

The National Central Library of Florence and the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali (Milan Conservatory) offer a joint contribution to shed light on the relationships between lyricists and composers, copyright practices, and the dynamics of the publishing market, given their impartial role in researching and preserving popular music collections. While Caterina Guiducci provides a comprehensive overview of music materials from the 1960s to the 1990s acquired through legal deposit, Sara Taglietti investigates the work of 1930s entertainment-music authors whose sources were recently made available at the Belluno Civic Library.

Greater Poland is a region of Poland renowned for its singing traditions for over 150 years. Singing societies began to emerge around the mid-19th century, not only in Poznań but also in smaller urban centers of the Grand Duchy of Posen. From the very beginning, their activities were guided by patriotic ideals—initially linked to independence sentiments and anti-Germanization efforts, and later to the shaping of Polish statehood. Some ensembles continue to operate to this day. The development of choral and singing traditions was accompanied by an increased production of works composed and arranged for vocal ensembles, as well as a flourishing publishing movement. The demand for choral works was met by directors of choirs such as Bolesław Dembiński as composer, and Kazimierz Barwicki, one of the most active publishers of choral music in the first half of the 20th century. Choral traditions were continued by such Poznań composers as Andrzej Koszewski and Stanisław Bolesław Poradowski.

University Library in Poznań keeps a rich collection of both autographs of the aforementioned composers and printed music related to the activity of choirs in the region. In this paper, I would like to present an overview of this collection. The final part of the paper will be devoted to discussing the collection of the St. Cecilia Singing Society in Połajewo, donated to the University Library in Poznań by the local Cultural Center, which will serve as a starting point for a discussion on the state of preservation of the heritage associated with the Greater Poland Singing Movement.

This paper will present three autograph manuscripts by Greek composers in the Oliver Neighbour collection at the British Library (BL): the Concertino for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1935) and Little Suite for Strings (1942) by Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949), and the song Mín klaís [Don’t Cry] (1911) by Manolis Kalomiris (1883–1962).

The collection is named after its former owner, the musicologist and music librarian Oliver Neighbour (1923–2015). It includes over 200 autograph manuscripts by composers who are either not represented elsewhere in the BL’s collections or complement existing collections. The manuscripts by Skalkottas and Kalomiris are good examples of the former, while the Skalkottas ones also reflect Neighbour’s personal interest in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his circle.

The paper will discuss aspects of the manuscripts’ transmission history and provide a brief introduction to the historical and socio-political context in which the works were created. It will examine Skalkottas’s atonal and dodecaphonic compositions in terms of the composer’s efforts to make atonal music more accessible in Greece. It will also discuss Kalomiris’s setting of a poem by the eminent Greek poet Kostis Palamas from his collection Oi pentasýllavi [The Pentasyllables] (1910). The song will be situated within the framework of Kalomiris’s ‘manifesto’ for Greek national music and his staunch Demoticist stance in the controversial language reform debates of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The manuscripts will be presented within the wider context of Greek music collections at the BL, acquired through legal deposit, purchase, and e-resource subscriptions.