RISM is used by musicologists seeking to discover where music is held, and by performers looking to expand their repertoire. The mission of the database is to document musical sources, and to help them reach an ever larger audience. RISM was founded in Paris in 1952 ; since 1985, the United States office of this international non-profit organization has been hosted at Harvard's Loeb Music Library.

When creating HOLLIS or HOLLIS for Archival Discovery records for Harvard materials, Harvard music cataloguers are encouraged to simultaneously create RISM records. Please begin by consulting the Muscat training documentation created by RISM Zentralredaktion (Central Office). When you're ready to begin cataloguing in Muscat, request a login and password from Zentralredaktion.

1. Is the item already in RISM?

Surprisingly often, materials already have RISM records but their HOLLIS and WorldCat records were not updated to include RISM citations. Additionally, if materials are coming to Harvard from a former owner who participated in RISM, they may have RISM records in need of adjusting, i.e. changing the siglum. Regardless of provenance it is a good idea to check for an existing RISM record before creating a new one. This searching is most easily done in the RISM OPAC. If you discover that the item you are cataloguing already has a RISM record, proceed directly to citation.

2. Is the item eligible?

Music materials by women and by composers from BIPOC backgrounds should always be reported to RISM; so should print and manuscript music materials representing the work of composers born no earlier than 1600, no later than 1800. It is cataloguers' judgment whether to include an item falling outside these parameters.

3. Editing an existing record

Perhaps you have discovered an error in an existing RISM record, or would like to contribute new information such as a link to a digitized version of the item. To open an existing record, navigate to Sources, then search on the RISM number in Any field contains. Note that identifiers with spaces, such as C 75, must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Once you've located the record you'd like to update, click on Edit. If you do not have editing privileges for this record, you'll only see View, but you can always add a comment to alert RISM Zentralredaktion staff to your contribution.

4. Contributing a new record

Open Muscat and begin a new record by clicking Create, located under Actions in the bottom right corner of the Sources screen.

You will be invited to select a template. If you are unsure which template best corresponds to the item, a Help panel on the right side of the screen provides guidance.

Library information and relations

The sigla provided for Harvard University are:

US-CAa (Andover-Harvard Theological Library)

US-CAe (Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library)

US-CAh (Houghton Library)

US-CAt (Harvard Theatre Collection)

US-CAua (Harvard University Archives)

US-CAw (Widener Library)

US-CAward (John Milton Ward Collection, Harvard Theatre Collection; redirects to US-CAt)

Do not use US-CA, the old siglum for Houghton Library.

In general, try to provide information that will help the user locate the record in HOLLIS: for instance, for a Merritt Room item, enter Merritt Room in Department, rather than at the head of the Shelfmark, as this could make it difficult for the user to find the correct call number for a HOLLIS browse.

Provenance (852 $z) is a field for indicating the name of a collection, such as a collection, bequest, gift, papers, archive, Nachlass, or similar, that the source belongs to. Ownership marks go in the field Provenance note (561).

People and institutions

If necessary, you may create and link to a new authority record, following the guidelines on RISM's YouTube tutorial. If the composer is unknown, use Anonymus. An attribution made on the item itself is not acknowledged in the field Attribution, however if you have arrived at the attribution through other means than transcription, you may select Alleged, Ascertained, Conjectural, Doubtful or Misattributed from the drop-down menu. If the source is anonymous, leave this field blank.

Title and content description

Title on source is a transcription of the title as it appears on the item, with two customs specific to RISM: a line break is indicated by a pipe surrounded by spaces, and the source of the title is always given in brackets.

Enter a Scoring summary if it makes sense to do so; a sketch, for example, may have indeterminate scoring. A complete list of instrument abbreviations may be found on the RISM-OPAC Help page.

In general, standardized titles should be pluralized.

Material description

For Dimensions, always gives both height and width, in cm.

Plate numbers are truly plate numbers; a publisher's number would be entered as a General note.

When a digital surrogate exists for a manuscript item, add a link in External resource.

Incipit

The incipit is essential to your record: it enables identification and comparison of musical sources. Each melody of each movement should be recorded here, unless onerous (in the case of a long work, the first movement is sufficient; for an opera, customarily RISM cataloguers give the first melody, the first sung text and everything in between). Anything preceding the melody should also be included.

RISM uses Plaine & Easie Code, a library standard for encoding music. Plaine & Easie code is maintained by RISM and by the International Association of Music Libraries (IAML). Documentation is available on the IAML website.

In general, strive to avoid creating redundant information, especially in the Incipit section. Tempo cannot stand in for title, for instance, and Voice/instrument scoring should not be repeated in Scoring in movement.

The Work number is always 1.

References and notes

Location of performance may only be used if the source (not the work) is associated with a particular performance.

Administration

Please be sure to select a Language of cataloguing from the drop-down menu as this is not automated. However, Published is the default setting, so as soon as you Save or Save and continue editing, your record will be queued for publication.

5. Saving

Muscat does not auto-save. Be sure to Save and continue editing, or, when your work is finished, Save and close. Save and continue editing will keep the record on your screen, Save and close will save the record and return you to it in View mode.

Save your record as soon as you are able to, once yellow-highlighted fields are populated, to avoid losing work. Note that Muscat will allow you to save if yellow-highlighted fields have orange warnings, but not if they have red warnings.

6. Cataloguing prints

When cataloguing printed music, be sure to use field 588, Copy examined for cataloging. This field is found in records of the type "Printed music edition, collection parent record or individual item" and you see it if you are revising existing RISM records or adding new records. (This field does not appear in holdings information.) When revising existing records or adding new records, please fill out the field Copy examined for cataloging (588). This field names the siglum and shelfmark of the copy that acted as the basis for information in the record. This is useful for other RISM contributors as well as OPAC users. Given variations and degrees of incompleteness that are common in printed music, it is good practice to document which copy was examined.

7. Attach an image

If desired, a cataloguer may upload an image that could be useful to users or difficult to describe. Examples include watermarks, bindings and unclear text. To see uploaded image content, click on Authorities, then Images.

You may upload an image and attach it to your record. This is done from within the record: save it, and click on Attach a new image.

8. Comments

Other Muscat users can be contacted by typing "@" followed by their name in the Comments field of a saved record in View mode. Note that your comment will always be visible to Muscat users.

9. Citation

Once your record is complete, be sure to update the HOLLIS and WorldCat records to link to it. (You may wish to wait until the record is live on the RISM OPAC; this is up to you but be sure to note that you need to check on the publication status of the record.) Citation instructions for Harvard Library cataloguers have been created by the Metadata Best Practices group.

10. Tips

Unica

Have you ever wondered how many printed unica (unicum: a musical composition found in only one source) a repository holds? This information is easily found through a Muscat search: click on the tab Faceted search, choose Library siglum from the drop-down menu at the top of the page, then, on the Number of printed copies, change the second value to 1. The results can be sorted by standardized title, composer or date, and can be downloaded as a CSV or MARCXML file.

Standardized title for collection

For collection-level records, the practice for Standardized title has changed slightly from past usage. RISM now uses X Items in Standardized title rather than following earlier examples such as X Pieces or X Works.

Obsolete fields

Please do not use field 260, 598 and 740. These are obsolete fields schedules for removal from the templates.

Greyed-out screen

If your cataloguing template is greyed out and you can't get back into it, you likely have a Search window open.

Changing a record's format

At the moment, we can't change the formats of records that were entered under the wrong template. If you'd like to add holdings to a print record that's been erroneously saved as a manuscript, for instance, you have two options: make a note and wait until the template change is possible, or tag Zentralredaktion in the Comments field and ask for your record's format to be changed.

Batch editing records

It's possible to edit large numbers of records at once in Muscat, by automatically add all sources to a folder by clicking on the button "Add to a new folder" which appears on the right under all the filters.

Above the table there is a box that lets you select all.

Click that, then under Batch Actions, click "Create Folder with Selected". Name your folder and click OK. Note that you have only added the first 30 records on the page.

To get the rest, you have to go to the next page, click all, then add them to your folder (Batch Actions-->Add to Folder Selected), and so on through all the pages. Once you have all of them, go up to Folders in the menu and you should see yours there. Click View. Now you can see on the right under Actions there is Publish. Simply click that and they will get the status "Published."

For housekeeping purposes you can delete the folder once you are done.

Unicode

Muscat is encoded in UTF-8. If you use special characters in your records (for example, for title page transcriptions), please use unicode symbols. There are many unicode resources online, such as https://unicode-table.com.

Searching by non-indexed terms

Users of RISM may express interest in searching the OPAC in unanticipated ways. Here are some workarounds for searching by non-indexed terms:

Place of publication

Most of the prints in the RISM OPAC have been scanned and imported from the blue volumes published several decades ago, and searchability is therefore far from optimal as compared to the rest of the contents of the database. First, go back to the printed volumes, and in particular to the register volume appended to them, where the place of publication can be accessed directly. Another possible approach is to search the OPAC by institutions (publishers and printers) that were active in the period the patron is researching. Upon locating a relevant print, look for the institution connected with it, and click on the link -- this opens up a small information tab, and in the lower right corner there is yet another link: "All records linked to this index item." The patron will likely already have some publishers in mind that can be input into this search.

Upload schedule

New RISM records are uploaded once a month, on the 16th or the first business day thereafter. New Holdings records for prints as well as new edits to published records should be visible almost immediately.

Muscat Kaffeepause

For unknown reasons, the Muscat server experiences a brief shut-down at 3 p.m. Cambridge time. Please be sure to save your work so as to avoid losing your record. You may also find yourself briefly locked out of Muscat at this time. For information about scheduled system outages, please consider using the RISM Slack channel and Google Group, and following RISM on Twitter.