Thanks to his additional role as music librarian and the fact that the venue in Salzburg is accessible by train, Rolf Wissmann had the opportunity to attend the full IAML conference (6-11 July) for the first time.
This diverse conference attracts not only employees of music memory institutions, but also highly decorated international music researchers who work with historical music documents.
Numerous experts from the field of digital musicology were invited as speakers (program).

The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) is a key part of any IAML conference. In several presentations, especially from the RISM Digital Center, new features and visions for the RISM Catalogue and RISM Online were introduced. These included the expansion of the data model to enable works to be recorded and/or linked, and plans to include ‘existing’ inventories.

On Tuesday, there was the opportunity to participate in the two-part RISM workshop led by Jennifer Ward and Balász Mikusi. The workshop provided an introduction to the Muscat cataloguing software using real-life examples. In the first part, the basics were worked out using a print. The second part focused on a composite manuscripts, in RISM so called collections, where both the composite manuscript and the individual parts were recorded using metadata and linked to the higher-level record.

The RISM Cataloging Guidelines outside Muscat have recently been made publicly available. This makes working with RISM records much easier and more transparent.
It also provides a good introduction to familiarise oneself with the cataloguing rules in advance.
This is particularly relevant to our research project, in which we deal with didactic materials, a mixture of text and music that differs significantly from purely music sources.
The importance of recording musical sources in RISM should not be underestimated. For many music researchers, RISM is the first and, unfortunately, too often the only source for retrieving musical sources. For the sake of better findability, standardised recording and visibility of research results, the metadata of the sources we deal with should therefore also be recorded in RISM, not only in GAMS.