Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

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Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond project: “an essential stepping-stone into the riches of nineteenth-century periodical literature” (Music & Letters), “should be on the reference shelves of every major library” ( Journal of the American Musicological Society), “The excellence of this worthwhile project is beyond doubt” (Times Literary Supplement). 9 Regarding the promised publication schedule and scope, Robert frequently recounts—with pride—that at the 1987 IMS meeting in Bologna and Parma, one distinguished scholar pronounced that Robert “was nuts” to attempt something so ambitious. In the 1990s, with the addition of Christoph-Helmut Mahling’s research center at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, these production goals were continually met. This decade saw the creation of new RIPM groups in Scandinavia, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, and Portugal, with additional indexing carried out at the International Center in Maryland. By 1998, RIPM had achieved its initial goal, namely, one hundred volumes in ten years, a rate of production noted by multiple NEH reviewers, one of whom described it as “a dream of productivity that is virtually unprecedented in the field of musical scholarship.” 10 With the dawn of the new millennium, Robert laid the groundwork for a wholesale transformation of RIPM in the coming two decades. First, RIPM became incorporated as a federally-approved not-for-profit organization and RIPM’s offices were relocated to Baltimore, achieving financial and administrative independence. Concurrently, after one decade with the publisher UMI, Robert negotiated a new contract with the Baltimore-based publisher NISC, thereby beginning RIPM’s entry into online distribution. In 2000, the RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals Online first appeared on NISC’s Biblioline service. Additional online distributors would be added in the next decade, including OCLC’s FirstSearch, EBSCO’s EBSCOHost, and Ovid’s SilverPlatter. 11 However, the usefulness of an index to source material is certainly dependent upon one’s access to the sources cited. Since scholars “rediscovered” the wealth of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical press, three issues prevented its wider study and application in scholarship, namely (i) which journals were important, both for general musical information and specialized studies; (ii) how and where can one quickly access a copy of the journals sought; and (iii) how does one locate content within thousands of pages, if no 9 Music & Letters 71, no. 1 (February 1990). Journal of the American Musicological Society 43, no. 3 (Fall 1990). Times Literary Supplement (31 March – 6 April 1989). 10 “Reviews.” https://ripm.org/?page=Reviews (accessed 24 February 2021). 11 For more on the challenges and complexities of the world of scholarly databases, see Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie’s essay herein, “A Tale of Two R-Project Directors”: 501-11.. 17
Introduction index is available. By the early 2000s, RIPM had done much to solve the first problem, through publication of Periodica musica and the increased scholarly attention given to the musical press, and the last problem, through its continual indexing efforts which by circa 2005 had resulted in some one hundred fifty volumes published and 450,000 annotated citations online. The second problem remained largely unresolved. Although RIPM had jointly sponsored a preservation microfilming project with UMI in the 1990s, which made available a number of rare journals, the increasingly-widespread availability of the World Wide Web meant that one could search and read historic texts from one’s home or office at the speed of a click. 12 With an initial foundation laid by the efforts of JSTOR in the late 1990s, Robert began a study of best practices for digitization. With the support of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals debuted in 2009. In order to meet the project’s need for original source copies, RIPM created a Partner and Participating Libraries program which has allowed RIPM to scan millions of pages from dozens of major libraries ranging from the Library of Congress to the Moscow Conservatory, and the Cenidim in Mexico City to the Eastman School of Music’s Sibley Music Library. 13 RIPM created an onsite scanning laboratory, scanning equipment for use offsite in libraries, developed a robust IT infrastructure, established hosting servers and all of the associated technological requirements, too numerous to list. Development of RIPM’s digitization efforts coincided with a consolidation amongst RIPM’s online distributors following the financial crisis of 2008. As such, Robert advocated for the creation of RIPM’s own online delivery platform which came to be known as RIPMPlus. The creation of this platform—and the flexibility and control it offered to RIPM—laid the groundwork for RIPM’s future digital initiatives. First, through its scanning operations, massive collections were made available to RIPM including many journals which ran for tens to hundreds of thousands of pages. The necessity of a project which could provide access to large quantities of journals, in complete runs, scanned and full-text searchable, without having to wait for indexing, became clear. Thus the RIPM Preservation Series was born— initially titled the RIPM Full Text Supplement, later the eLibrary of Music Periodicals—a project which continues to grow, approaching one million pages and billions of searchable terms. 12 Certainly this is a fulfillment of Barry S. Brook’s “Gin and Tonic Phantasy,” as illuminated by Zdravko Blažeković’s essay herein. See “The Early Years of the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale,” 353. 13 A complete, up-to-date list of Parter and Participating Libraries is available on RIPM’s website, ripm.org. 18
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