The purpose of this paper is to present a new web‐based cataloguing system for the global music bibliography project, Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), and discuss the implications for the manipulation and discovery of musical heritage materials.
The paper is designed to illustrate the workflow and tools used in creating a global musical catalogue, and to present the experiences of the Swiss RISM working group in developing new tools and re‐thinking traditional music bibliography tools.
The new tools developed present a further decrease in latency between source cataloguing and availability to users by integrating both the cataloguing and exploration interfaces into a single web application.
For music researchers, the opportunity to search and manipulate a global musical source database opens up new possibilities for data‐driven computational musicology and analysis.
This paper reports preliminary work in musical incipit searching in the Swiss RISM database, as well as the latest developments in integrating digital facsimile images and sound resources.
