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Introduction<br />
index is available. By the early 2000s, RIPM had done much to solve the first<br />
problem, through publication of Periodica musica and the increased scholarly<br />
attention given to the musical press, and the last problem, through its continual<br />
indexing efforts which by circa 2005 had resulted in some one hundred<br />
fifty volumes published and 450,000 annotated citations online. The second<br />
problem remained largely unresolved. Although RIPM had jointly sponsored<br />
a preservation microfilming project with UMI in the 1990s, which made available<br />
a number of rare journals, the increasingly-widespread availability of the<br />
World Wide Web meant that one could search and read historic texts from<br />
one’s home or office at the speed of a click. 12 With an initial foundation laid by<br />
the efforts of JSTOR in the late 1990s, Robert began a study of best practices<br />
for digitization. With the support of two grants from the National Endowment<br />
for the Humanities, the RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals debuted in<br />
2009. In order to meet the project’s need for original source copies, RIPM created<br />
a Partner and Participating Libraries program which has allowed RIPM to<br />
scan millions of pages from dozens of major libraries ranging from the Library<br />
of Congress to the Moscow Conservatory, and the Cenidim in Mexico City to<br />
the Eastman School of Music’s Sibley Music Library. 13 RIPM created an onsite<br />
scanning laboratory, scanning equipment for use offsite in libraries, developed<br />
a robust IT infrastructure, established hosting servers and all of the associated<br />
technological requirements, too numerous to list.<br />
Development of RIPM’s digitization efforts coincided with a consolidation<br />
amongst RIPM’s online distributors following the financial crisis of<br />
2008. As such, Robert advocated for the creation of RIPM’s own online<br />
delivery platform which came to be known as RIPMPlus. The creation of<br />
this platform—and the flexibility and control it offered to RIPM—laid the<br />
groundwork for RIPM’s future digital initiatives. First, through its scanning<br />
operations, massive collections were made available to RIPM including many<br />
journals which ran for tens to hundreds of thousands of pages. The necessity<br />
of a project which could provide access to large quantities of journals,<br />
in complete runs, scanned and full-text searchable, without having to wait<br />
for indexing, became clear. Thus the RIPM Preservation Series was born—<br />
initially titled the RIPM Full Text Supplement, later the eLibrary of Music<br />
Periodicals—a project which continues to grow, approaching one million<br />
pages and billions of searchable terms.<br />
12 Certainly this is a fulfillment of Barry S. Brook’s “Gin and Tonic Phantasy,” as illuminated<br />
by Zdravko Blažeković’s essay herein. See “The Early Years of the Répertoire International<br />
d’Iconographie Musicale,” 353.<br />
13 A complete, up-to-date list of Parter and Participating Libraries is available on RIPM’s website,<br />
ripm.org.<br />
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