Briefs / Feuilletons

Abstract

Briefs / Feuilletons Natalie Lorch, Pauline Sjöberg, and Ricardo Tacuchian The Music Department of the German Historical Institute in Rome (Italy), with a project funded by the German Research Council DFG, has completely digitised two of the most important collections of Italian opera manuscripts. The work was completed by a team under the scientific supervision of musicologist, Dr. Roland Pfeiffer. Aspects of this project were presented at the IAML annual congresses in Moscow (2010) and Dublin (2011). The original manuscripts are in the possession of aristocratic families in Rome. Their digitisation consists of more than 110,000 single images and includes copies of around 143 full opera scores from the Roman and Neapolitan region, datable from 1770 to 1815, and held by the private library located in the palace of the Principi Massimo family. These manuscripts had first been recognized within a list published by Friedrich Lippmann in 1976 (“Musikhandschriften und –Drucke in der Bibliothek des Fürstenhauses Massimo, Rom. Katalog“, in Studien zur italienisch-deutschen Musikgeschichte XI, ed. by Friedrich Lippmann. Analecta musicologica, 17. [Köln, 1976], 254–295). The originals of the second opera collection now digitised are held by the Archivio Doria Pamphilj, situated in the palace of this well-known aristocratic family, where also can be found one of the most important private art museums of the city. The thirty-six complete scores are mostly Roman comic and serious operas datable around 1760–1770, but there are also some earlier and later datable oratorios. To these scores must be added twenty-eight volumes of aria collections (often titled with “Arie di diversi autori”, among these also music by less known composers), and around 125 single pieces in loose quires (mostly arias and some ensembles), which have also been included in the digitisation project. At present, all digital copies can be consulted by researchers within the library of the Music Department of the German Historical Institute in Rome (contact: pfeiffer@dhiroma.it). Detailed schedules of the opera scores from the Massimo collection (library siglum: I-Rmassimo), created by the team of the project, can be found in the RISM database https://opac.rism.info. Authority control for historic recordings and METS/MODS exchange format for digitised historic sound carriers at the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden (SLUB). Since July 2015, it is possible to generate data records for historic sound recordings in the German Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei – GND). A set of categories for this purpose was prepared at the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden (SLUB) in cooperation with the project partners from the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek – DNB), and the Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, Vienna. Information on historic recordings of the shellac era (ca. 1890–1960), such as recording date or place is very rare. Consequently, the project aims to provide a cataloguing tool and obtaining a data pool for research on early recordings. Within this project, SLUB will prepare 5,000 data records as a basic set for this discographic authority file. The fundamental metadata will be supplied by the recently completed 78 rpm record project “Archiv der Stimmen”, in which SLUB catalogued and digitised about 16,000 sound recordings (see mediathek.slub-dresden.de). [End Page 45] The discographic authority file is part of the project “Standardisation of Metadata for Audiofiles” (Standardisierung von Erschließungsdaten digitalisierter Tonträger in wiss-enschaftlichen Sammlungen), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Another part of this project consists of modeling a METS/MODS profile for digitised sound carriers. The ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC) in New York City has recently partnered with the Internet Archive in San Francisco. They have afforded us the space and capabilities to process and handle a great many new projects and donations. Here are a few developments that may be of interest to readers: • Gracenote (who supply metadata to a great many commercial entities, including iTunes) donated 13,074 DVDs. There are also a few thousand compact discs, music books, and music periodicals. The good news is that everything is expertly, electronically, catalogued. While there are a great many music videos in this collection, there are also a substantial amount of Hollywood releases, foreign films, TV...