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RIPM: A Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1760–1966)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

Estelle Joubert*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University [email protected]

Extract

RIPM (Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale) is widely regarded as the most comprehensive resource offering electronic access to music periodicals from the early Romantic era to the twentieth century. Founded in 1980 by H. Robert Cohen, RIPM is the youngest of the so-called ‘4 R's of International Music Research’; its partner initiatives include RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), and RIdIM (Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale). Cohen's ambitious project was notably visionary in its use of technology: not only did it use computing from the start (beginning with DOS-based indexing systems), but it was also the first of the 4 R's to explore full text searching. RIPM seeks to address ‘two main problems that have prevented these [historic music] journals from being systematically collected and examined: (1) the limited number of libraries possessing the journals, and (2) the difficulty encountered when one attempts to locate specific information within an available source’. The project has thus focused on collection building, curation, indexing and accessibility. This international cooperative's accomplishments are impressive: as of July 2020, the database contains 527 music periodicals, 430 available in full text complete runs, totalling 996,000 annotated records and 1.47 million full-text pages of music periodicals.

Type
Digital Resource Review
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 For a description of the ‘4 R's of International Music Research’ see www.r-musicprojects.org (accessed 22 August 2020). I am using Chrome version 85.0.4183.102 in this and subsequent searches.

2 Benjamin Knysak, ‘Citation: H. Robert Cohen, 2016, Rome’, see www.iaml.info/citation-h-robert-cohen-2016-rome (accessed 22 August 2020).

3 See www.r-musicprojects.org/ripm.html (accessed 19 September 2020).

4 https://ripm.org (accessed 19 September 2020).

5 Given the readership and scope of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, I am focusing primarily on the nineteenth-century holdings of these resources.

6 https://ripm.org/?page=twoseries (last accessed 19 September 2020).

7 This search was carried out on 19 September 2020.

8 For a detailed comparison, see https://ripm.org/index.php?page=RIPMonEBSCOHost (accessed 20 August 2020).

9 For a comprehensive list of indices and guides to Western periodicals see https://acrl.libguides.com/ess/periodicalindexes (accessed 22 August 2020).

10 See https://anno.onb.ac.at (last accessed 19 September 2020).

12 Search conducted on 17 September 2020.

13 Search conducted on 17 September 2020.

14 Search conducted on17 September 2020.

15 See for instance, Ann Smart, Mary, Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parker, Roger and Ann Smart, Mary, eds, Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Applegate, Celia, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Ellis, Katherine, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

16 http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/index.vm (accessed 17 September 2020).

17 www.internetculturale.it (accessed 17 September 2020).

18 https://zdb-katalog.de/index.xhtml (accessed 17 September 2020).

19 See Lesley A. Wright's article, ‘Critical Allusion and Critical Assessment: Berlioz's and Reyer's Reviews of Bizet in the Journal des débats’, in the special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, ‘Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music’.

20 The RIPMplus interface would benefit from more testing to improve the accuracy of results, rendering of pages and so forth.

21 This search was carried out on the EBSCO interface on 19 September 2020.

22 See Ralph Locke's essay, ‘How Reliable Are Nineteenth-Century Reviews of Concerts and Operas?: Félicien David's Le Désert and His Grand Opéra Herculanum’, in the special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, ‘Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music’.

24 See Christopher Moore's essay, ‘Three Versions of Classic: The Construction of Gabriel Fauré in the 1920s’, in the special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, ‘Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music’.

25 This search was carried out on 19 September 2020.

26 Text mining is not currently a possibility with RIPM as any kind of text mining (sentiment analysis, topic theory, network analysis, etc.) requires building a corpus, which in turn requires the availability of documents (in this case periodicals or reviews) in .txt format.

27 See my ‘“Distant Reading” in French Music Criticism’, in the special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, ‘Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music’.