Every year, lately around August or September, music libraries around the world receive a very large blue book: the latest annual volume of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. Every year we know it will be heavier to lift, perhaps a few millimeters thicker, with approximately 1000 more entries than the previous volume. Its growth is even more striking when comparing volumes over a wider span of years. The number of citations indexed annually by RILM has more than doubled over the past decade (1986=7,143 citations; 1996=18,101) and has grown sevenfold since its first volume (1967=2532 citations). Scanning the shelves of other current music literature bibliographies, a similar swelling of the bindings from year to year is observed in The Music Index and Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums—a graphic reminder of the ever-expanding body of literature which music scholars must somehow attempt to control through use of these mammoth bibliographic tools. Today, most scholars have abandoned the use of these large, handsomely produced printed volumes in favor of their efficient electronic counterparts, saving considerable time and effort; thankfully waning are the days of manually consulting each annual volume and transcribing citations.

Barry S. Brook's visionary article, "Music Literature and Modern Communication: Revolutionary Potentials of the ACLS/CUNY/RILM Project," takes us back to the days when there were few convenient tools to aid scholars in finding their way through the rapidly expanding world of music literature. The available bibliographic tools were either lacking in scope of coverage or in timeliness, or both. Inspired by developments in computer technology, goaded by the success of medical and scientific international abstracting initiatives, and buoyed by the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, Brook envisioned an ambitious role for the RILM project: It would strive to make "complete information about all significant [music] literature . . . speedily accessible to scholars, teachers and students; . . . if these developments could drastically reduce the scholar's search time and forestall duplication of effort, would they not provide him with greater opportunity for contemplative thought, for the testing of hypotheses, for creative research, and thus for the expansion of knowledge?"¹ While Brook admitted that "RILM's mythical goal: total bibliographical control of all scholarly information about music, past and present, may be only partially approachable,"² today's scholars are immeasurably grateful that he led the effort toward this goal. While apparently leaving the retrospective indexing arena to be addressed by unspecified later projects (he may have imagined a project like RIPM, but hardly the International Index to Music Periodicals), RILM has certainly succeeded in documenting all but a small portion of the significant literature on music from 1967 to the present. However, as we celebrate over three decades of RILM's production, it is appropriate to examine RILM today from the viewpoint of how fully it is serving the research needs of today's scholars, and to what extent it still resembles Brook's original vision for RILM. How complete is it? Is current bibliographic information speedily accessible to scholars? Before entertaining these questions, we should first shed light on the environment from which the RILM project emerged and examine the way in which RILM's production methods have evolved from those described in Brook's Symposium article in 1969.

 

The birth of RILM

From today's vantage point, the 1960s seem like a much simpler time (at least in musico-bibliographic terms). How quaint it sounds to read that the scholars of that era were feeling overwhelmed by "the continual growth" of annual musicological publication worldwide! At a 1965 symposium entitled "Musicology and the Computer I," sponsored by the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society, Brook lamented the current state of affairs:

 

The documentation crisis in virtually all disciplines is well known. It will grow worse. . . . It has been demonstrated that the number of scholarly periodicals doubles roughly every fifteen years and increases tenfold every fifty years. Derek de Solla Price has shown that "80 to 90 percent of all scientists that have ever been alive are alive today." Furthermore, to quote Eric Boehm, "a given subject with a dozen qualified scholars today, may have hundreds and thousands in 50 years."³ Unless something is done about it, keeping abreast of one's discipline, even one's little corner in the discipline, will become an increasingly frustrating and impossible occupation; search time and search fatigue with resultant inefficiency will multiply exponentially.⁴

To illustrate Brook's point, consider the following: The College Music Symposium was first indexed in The Music Index in its 1962 annual volume, one of 39 new periodical titles added that year.⁵ The number of Ph.D. dissertations in music was also increasing at an impressive rate. A search of the Dissertation Abstracts database (now going by the title ProQuest Digital Dissertations) reveals 42 Ph.D. dissertations in music in 1950, 125 in 1960, and 224 in 1970more than quintupling in only two decades.⁶

Later in his address, Brook continued his lament:

 

The overall situation in musicological documentation is grim. One word accurately describes it: inundation. Florence Kretzschmar, editor of Music Index, used the word several times in a recent conversation. . . . Her excellent index is years behind. Even further behind is Wolfgang Schmieder's invaluable Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums.⁷

The Music Index, established in 1949, and Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums, reborn in 1954, were the first separately published current music literature bibliographies to survive more than a handful of years. For the first time, music scholars had tools to provide an adequate level of subject and author control for articles in a defined list of current music periodicals;⁸Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums extended this control to articles in non-periodical collective volumes, and listed books and dissertations as well. Both indexes were certainly welcome additions to reference collections, but fell short of fully satisfying the needs of music researchers, particularly musicologists. In a 1979 interview, Kretzschmar reflected upon early criticism of The Music Index's breadth of coverage:

 

When we were starting to talk about The Music Index the musicologists didn't want it to include anything but items related to their special interests. I told them that the only way the Music Index would survive would be to hit as broad a base as possible, that is, include the more popular journals, such as Billboard and Variety, so that the public libraries would provide a large share of our market."⁹

At the 1950 congress of the International Association of Music Libraries (IAML), Vladimir Fédorov (then General Secretary of the Association) proposed the establishment of an international index to musicological periodicals, in which national libraries or other designated groups would be responsible for indexing periodicals published in their countries and reporting them to a central office. This project was seriously debated within IAML for several years, resulting in a technical plan in 1955 for the establishment of Musicological Index, surprisingly with Kretzschmar's firm, Information Service, Inc., to serve as the central office.¹⁰ It was designed to be affordable to the individual scholar and to smaller institutions at only $10 per year, in contrast to the high annual cost of The Music Index, then at $125 per year.¹¹ However, at such a low price, it was estimated that 500 subscriptions were necessary to launch Musicological Index. The plan was never implemented, whether due to insufficient advance subscriptions or for other reasons, but Brook later incorporated much of this international cooperative model into his vision for RILM twelve years later.

The 1954 publication of Wolfgang Schmieder's Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums1950-51 volume may have also dampened enthusiasm for the establishment of Fédorov's Musicological Index project. It focused primarily on musicological publications, with fairly broad international coverage. However, once the publication gap of Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums widened to six years by 1965, the need for a more current bibliography of scholarly music literature was clear. With the emergence of computerized data processing, Brook sensed the time was right to revisit Féderov's plan. Brook presented a detailed technical plan for RILM at the 1965 congress of IAML in Dijon, and with support from the American Council for Learned Societies he established a central office at the City University of New York in 1966 and commenced indexing and abstracting work with his staff and network of national committees in January 1967.

 

RILM's production methods

Brook's Symposium article was one of a cluster of similar articles published between 1967 and 1971¹² promoting participation in the RILM project shortly after its establishment. The Symposium article is devoted primarily to a description of "The RILM System" (i.e., method of production) in its six phases: 1) data collection; 2) processing and editing; 3) "keyboarding;" 4) computer operations; 5) photocomposition; and 6) generation of automatic by-products. As one might expect, all these production phases have evolved with improved computer technology and software development.

Phase 1: Data Collection

The concept of authors or journal editors submitting abstracts of their own publications remains central to RILM's data collection system. Submissions are still directed first toward the appropriate national committee office, of which there are currently 58. The national committees still maintain a dual role: they coordinate the collection of data from authors, editors and abstracting volunteers; and, as the primary gatekeepers, they have the difficult task of rejecting abstracts for items which fall outside of RILM's scope.¹³ For more than 20 years, all abstracts sent by the committees to RILM's International Center came in the form of large stacks of paper abstract forms which had to be manually keyed into RILM's production database upon arrival.¹⁴ In the early 1990s, some national committees began submitting abstracts on diskette or as e-mail attachments, following a precise data tagging protocol designed to permit automated upload into RILM's production database. In 1996, the author took the whole process to the Web, by creating online input forms for specific document types. These can be accessed today via the RILM web site (http://www.rilm.org/).¹⁵ This relieved national committee members from having to learn the manual tagging protocol, since the software automatically provides the correct tagging of data for each field. Later that year, RILM opened access to web abstract submission to the general public. Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, Editor-in-Chief of RILM Abstracts, recently remarked:

 

The number of paper forms decreases every year. Record submission through our web site is favored by many, because it is so easy. We find, in fact, that we receive more author-written abstracts than we used to because authors want their publications represented in RILM and would often rather write their own abstract than trust someone else to do it. Now it is easy for them to do so.¹⁶

The staff at the International Center supplements the data provided by authors and national committees in a variety of ways. In particular, they focus on literature from countries not currently represented by an active national committee. They also work closely with designated area editors to evaluate completeness of coverage for topics such as ethnomusicology, dance, and some national and regional areas. RILM's Executive Editor, Zdravko Blaekovi, regularly surveys journals for special bibliographies, such as national lists of university theses¹⁷ and various "Publications Received" columns. Databases in related disciplines are also occasionally scanned for music articles in non-music publications.

The national committee data collection process is time consuming, which forces a certain time lag upon RILM. When it first began publishing in a quarterly format in 1967, RILM was able to maintain an impressive level of currency. The first issue appeared in the hands of subscribers approximately four months after the most recent citation contained in the fascicle.¹⁸ At the first meeting of RILM's governing body, Brook stressed "the importance of rapid availability of information which had been a cardinal objective of RILM since its inception and which will become even more significant as the number of productive scholars grows."¹⁹ Unfortunately, a number of production problems in the early years caused the time lag to grow and grow, extending to three years by the late 1970s and to six years by early 1990s. A concerted effort by the International Center and the larger national committees succeeded in reducing the gap to around three years by 1994, but the volume of literature and amount of coordination necessary meant little could be done to improve upon this.

Mackenzie took a bold step in January 1997, reorganizing the workflow at the International Center to enable the timely publication of citations for a list of current music periodicals.²⁰ These citations would be assigned a broad classification number, then uploaded as temporary records into RILM's electronic products, to be overlaid by the fully indexed and abstracted records at a later date. She also placed RILM on a monthly update schedule, resulting in a time lag of only two to four weeks for most journals. This current citation initiative is being expanded to include a growing list of journals, as well as all committee-submitted citations, with the goal that citations of all journal articles and other records received by the International Center be available online within one month.

 

Phase II: Processing and Editing; Phase III: Keyboarding

Any "keyboarding" of paper abstracts submitted by national committees now happens in advance of all other processing and editing techniques. Gone are the days of card file indexes for each abstract. And of course, this "keyboarding" operation has long ago migrated from an offline procedure to an active online process, with links to name, subject, and journal title authority files to ensure uniform entry and record retrieval. RILM's sophisticated processing database, designed by Paul D. Petersen, permits abstracts to be "filtered" into the workflows of editors who are specialists in a particular class of literature. All staff editors, nearly all of whom hold advanced degrees in music, are trained in editing, indexing, and classification procedures, allowing for efficient processing of most abstracts.

Citations and abstracts for literature in foreign languages frequently arrive at the International Center still in need of translation; abstractors overseas are "urged to use the language in which they are most easily able to express themselves."²¹ If current staff at the International Center cannot adequately handle items in a particular language, external consultants are hired to translate abstracts into English. RILM now contains entries for items in over 100 languages. RILM has employed a variety of methods to key and store data in languages requiring characters beyond the standard US-ASCII keyboard. These characters are carefully rendered in the elegantly produced camera-ready pages printed in the International Center, but must be stripped of most diacritics before uploading their data to RILM's electronic vendors, OCLC and NISC. Fortunately, this distorting practice may soon come to an end. In recent years, great strides have been made in the "internationalization" initiative among developers of Internet and software engineering standards.²² Recent web browser releases are now capable of handling many different character sets and fonts, including the new Unicode standard.²³RILM's new production database software will permit a conversion to Unicode at the International Center. NISC's web and CD-ROM versions of RILM already display all Western European characters as represented by the ISO 8859-1 (or Latin 1) character set; OCLC has also implemented full display of the Latin 1 character set in some databases in FirstSearch (e.g., WorldCat), but as yet not in RILM. All other languages remain stripped of their diacritics. This results in such oddities as Antonín Dvořák's last name appearing as Dvorák (i.e., without a caron over the "r") on NISC's BiblioLine, since Czech characters such as appear in the ISO 8859-2 character set, as yet unsupported.

 

Phase IV: Computer Operations; Phase V: Photocomposition

The production database at the International Center continues to perform basic functions of assembling information leading toward the in-house production of camera-ready pages for the printed annual volumes of RILM, similar to those described in Brook's article. However, RILM's data undergoes further transformation after being uploaded into the end-user electronic databases produced by NISC and OCLC. These web databases vary considerably from one another in both function and in display of lists and individual citations. Their screen displays are less visually appealing than the printed volumes, but provide many more indexes to the information, with the ability to combine searches in different indexes to quickly and precisely locate desired abstracts.

The NISC's BiblioLine and the MuSe CD-ROM provide several interface options to users. The one which best combines ease of use with the most index searching possibilities is called "BiblioLine Professional: Advanced." The search screen presents multiple entry boxes, one for each searchable index. In addition to the modes of access available in the printed volumes (classification, author, subject, and journal title), NISC offers additional access through indexes for title, language, year of publication, type of publication, ISBN/ISSN, RILM record number, and several others. OCLC's FirstSearch offers additional separate indexes, including such useful and unusual modes of access as dissertation source (i.e., institution and degree), conference proceedings by city and year, city of publication, and publisher.²⁴ Of course, the largest advantages these electronic products have over the printed volumes is the ability to search all years of coverage at once, as well as giving access to the temporary "current citations" records.

 

Phase VI: Automatic By-Products

The production of specialized bibliographies as described by Brook was never implemented as a service by the International Center. Instead, that functionality has moved by stages to the hands of the end-user. In 1979, RILM was published as a searchable database on the Dialog Information Retrieval Service. This service enabled searchers (e.g., librarians), trained in issuing precise commands to the Dialog service via modem connection, to serve as intermediaries for their clients (faculty and students) in retrieving specialized lists of citations. End-user (i.e., unmediated) searching first became possible twelve years later in 1991, when RILM was made available on CD-ROM (published by NISC). RILM's affiliation with Dialog ended in 1993, but it returned to the Internet in 1996 when it was launched on OCLC's FirstSearch, a popular online service. A second online service, NISC's BiblioLine, became available in 1998. Now the ability to compile specialized bibliographies lies directly in the hands of researchers with access to these end-user interfaces.

Near the end of his article, Brook envisions a RILM database system which "could be combined with a document retrieval program employing, say, the ultra-microfiche process that compresses 3600 pages of text onto a single fiche and automatically locates and displays any page in seconds."²⁵ While this specific technology was not implemented for RILM, Brook would have been quite pleased to see the current generation of web-based literature databases with convenient links to full-text/full-image periodical articles. The International Index to Music Periodicals, Full Text Edition²⁶ was the first such database to appear among the music literature indexes, published initially in 1998. The current set of 39 full-text online periodicals includes several scholarly journals, such as British Postgraduate Musicology, In Theory Only, International Journal of Music Education, Notes, Perspectives of New Music, and Psychology of Music. RILM on OCLC's FirstSearch will have a similar capability soon, currently scheduled for implementation in late 2000, when its citations will be linked to full text articles available in OCLC's Electronic Collections Online service. NISC is also developing linkage to external sources of journal article full text data. The current electronic environment is ripe for exciting partnerships between RILM and the publishers of scholarly journals. For the benefit of all researchers, the major scholarly societies and publishers in music should make every effort to coordinate their electronic journal plans with RILM and its electronic vendors to ensure that we will someday have convenient linked access to articles located through the RILM database.

It is also exciting to contemplate a partnership with the JSTOR organization, which is involved in scanning and making available back files of scholarly journals for online full-text search and page image display. To date JSTOR has not made available any music journals, but this situation may soon change. Linking RILM's abstract records with such a service would be of great convenience to music scholars. While JSTOR offers its own search service, permitting full-text word search capabilities, it lacks the ability to restrict retrieval through controlled subject analysis. For example, a search of JSTOR's current humanities journals for the word "Sibelius" retrieved 35 items (articles, reviews, bibliographies, and minor notices) from the 1930s through the 1990s: 29 of these pertained to the composer Jean Sibelius, and nearly all were brief passing references to him.²⁷ Imagine the flood of irrelevant and insignificant retrievals after a substantial number of music journals are made available! JSTOR does permit more focused searching by title word, and in abstracts (for those journals which precede their articles with abstracts), but this method would certainly not provide comprehensive retrieval of relevant literature. Carefully controlled and applied subject vocabularies, provided by agencies such as RILM, will continue to provide the best mode of access to literature, providing the highest degree of relevancy among search index options. Establishing partnerships between JSTOR and abstracting/indexing organizations like RILM seems a natural fit, permitting the creation of interoperable search interfaces.

 

Striving to Achieve Brook's Vision for RILM

As mentioned earlier, Brook set lofty goals for RILM at the time of its founding: achieving complete bibliographic control of all significant information about music, and striving for rapid access to this information. Concerning the latter, RILM's current citations project has undoubtedly improved swift citation access to at least some of the most important music journals.²⁸ As noted earlier, a current goal at RILM is to quickly process electronic submissions of abstracts via the web site with an express processing procedure so they can be loaded with the current citations on a monthly basis. A faster turn-around time would likely encourage more authors to submit abstracts of their own literature, as well as encourage greater use of the RILM Abstracts database.

Concerning completeness of coverage, it is probably best to address treatment by document type. Since The Music Index and IIMP comprehensively index the full spectrum of music periodicals from the scholarly to the popular, RILM serves in a specialized "value added" role for the scholarly music journal segment of the literature. It comprehensively indexes and abstracts a smaller list of scholarly "core journals," selected by the national committees; using their committee staff and volunteers, they ensure that all significant items published in these journals are covered. Journals not on the "core" list are selectively covered. For these periodicals, RILM collects abstracts primarily through author, journal editor, and RILM area editor submissions. The result is a smaller, filtered scholarly bibliography of periodical literature. However, this method has its pitfalls: What happens when a scholarly journal is, for some reason, not placed on a national committee's core journal list, and the journal's authors and editors do not submit abstracts to RILM? Lacunae. Psychomusicology: A Journal of Research in Music Cognition, for example, was not added to the core list of journals until the 1990 volume of RILM. In 1989, Psychomusicology published two issues. Volume 8, number 1 (spring 1989) was fully indexed, but the second issue (fall 1989) containing 14 scholarly articles was not covered at all. Other articles from this journal not included in RILM are the following: an article by Rohner in volume 5, number 1-2, (1985); articles by Dowling, Bamberger and Brody, and Cohen in volume 4, number 1-2 (1984); articles by Campbell and Heller, Cuddy and Lyons, and Conley in volume 1 number 2; and all five articles in volume 1 number 1 (1981). Even more severe inconsistencies in coverage were noted for the Journal of Research in Music Education. The leadership of the musical scholarly societies and journals should renew their commitment to reporting research to RILM. Not doing so simply makes their literature less visible to future scholars, and therefore less influential. Thankfully, such gaps in abstracting for many journals will at least be represented by the International Center's current citation records for articles published after 1996, permitting at least basic author, title keyword, and classification access to these citations. It should also be noted that "the International Center accepts abstracts for previously omitted publications; such submissions will be included in the next published volume and put online and on the CD-ROM as soon as possible."²⁹

RILM's data collection procedures do ferret out a substantial number of music-relevant articles in non-music periodicals and collective volumes. As an indication of the former, a recent analysis of the journal titles contained in the RILM database revealed over 3500 different journals now represented in RILM. This impressive list of titles is available on the RILM web site at http://www.rilm.org/3500.html

It is difficult to criticize RILM's extensive efforts to collect, analyze and abstract articles in musical conference reports, Festschriften, and collections of essays. It has become the single best indexing to such publications. RILM's network of national committees harvests a great many of these items. Additional collective volumes come to light through author submissions or from regular review of bibliographies published in journals; these items are then obtained and processed by the International Center staff. A search of the OCLC WorldCat database for books with the Library of Congress subject keywords "Music" and "Congresses" (representing the vast majority of congress reports in music cataloged by libraries in the United States and some other English speaking countries) for the years 1969 to 1996 retrieved 995 bibliographic records. Searching RILM for the "book: symposium" document type for the same years retrieved 1859 book citations! Also consider that OCLC book records for conference proceedings do not usually contain detailed notes of the contents of each volume; RILM, on the other hand, generally provides full analysis of each volume, including abstracts. While this demonstrates RILM's impressive coverage of this area, scholars (and RILM's editors!) would still be wise to scan WorldCat for additional conference proceedings. Of the 44 music congresses published in 1990 located through the WorldCat search, only 25 (57%) were found on RILM. Of the 19 not in RILM, 14 were reports of European conferences, and five were reports of Asian conferences.

RILM also offers impressive international coverage for dissertations on musical topics. A survey of several years of RILM's coverage in comparison to ProQuest Digital Dissertations reveals a "filtered" sample of U.S. and Canadian dissertations in the former, eliminating the citations for recitals, lecture recital documents, compositions, and less substantial documents from the latter. RILM also contains a far greater number of citations for dissertations from other countries, especially through the 1970s and 1980s for which ProQuest Digital Dissertations has very little coverage outside North America. Again, the combination of national committee and author submissions worldwide, combined with research by International Center staff, makes for very impressive coverage of this area.

The preceding analyses have demonstrated that RILM is doing an admirable job of controlling many areas of music literature. Is there still a need to consult other current music literature bibliographies, especially periodical indexes? The following excerpt from RILM's scope guidelines illuminates the answer to this question:

 

Music literature can be roughly divided into two groups: (1) writings that provide an analysis, show the results of systematic research, or give a critical opinion or interpretation; (2) writings that provide a cursory or uncritical report or description, or that restate previously published information. The distinction can be between critical or scholarly writing (or its source material) on the one hand, and journalistic-style reporting on the other. The former category includes scholarly writing and important original analysis or criticism; the latter, writing intended to inform or instruct at a rudimentary level. RILM is concerned with writings in the first of these categories only. A large body of material exists that falls into the second category, but RILM's limited resources do not allow coverage of that.³⁰

Over the years, interpretation of these guidelines, and earlier ones,³¹ has naturally varied to a certain degree among national committee chairs and editors at the International Center. However, an examination of those journal titles currently indexed thoroughly by both The Music Index and IIMP, but are sparsely represented in RILM, if at all, provides a clear indication of the types of literature generally not found in RILM. Of these periodical titles, most were focused on popular music (Reggae Report, Melody Maker), trade publications (Billboard, etc.), musical performance (e.g., Percussion News, Piano & Keyboard, Guitar Player), and pedagogy (e.g., Music Teacher, American Suzuki Journal). It should be noted that music education coverage has improved greatly in recent years, as reflected in the growth of the five pedagogy classifications in RILM: 1986 contained 360 entries; 1991 had 463 entries; and 1996 featured 622 entries. However, comprehensive literature searches by music education scholars may need to include consultation of not only the other music periodical indexes, but also those in the fields of education, psychology, sociology, and other related disciplines.

In the 1960s, Brook and Kretzschmar felt "inundated" by the vast amount of literature being published, as writings on music increased rapidly from year to year. As we have seen, and as Brook predicted, it "grew worse." In 1990, the College Music Society sponsored a symposium entitled "The Music Information Explosion and its Implications for College Teachers and Students." In a presentation at that symposium, Thomas F. Heck likened the modern humanist scholar to a sailor on a vast sea of information:

 

Experienced sailors . . . know that they are at grave risk without their charts. They could easily sail in circles, miss an important inlet, or worse, founder on a reef that might have been avoided. As the nautical chart to the mariner, so the bibliography to the humanist scholar. The more complete its information, the truer and safer the voyage will be. And likewise, without the vital information compiled by one's predecessors on the high seas of knowledge, one proceeds in ignorance and at one's peril.³²

Clearly one still needs a number of bibliographic "charts" in addition to RILM to navigate the vast seas of contemporary music information. However, RILM remains the only electronic index to all written forms of scholarly documentation in music from after the late 1960s. Thorough searches for recent literature will still require supplemental querying of databases such as OCLC's WorldCat for books, The Music Index and IIMP for articles in some classes of periodicals, Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe for newspaper articles and reviews, and other specialized bibliographies. We still long for more comprehensive and convenient mapping of music scholarship published prior to RILM's founding. However, few would deny that Barry Brook's vision, and the wise leadership and dedication of RILM's editors, staff and volunteers, have provided us with the best series of paper and electronic charts to the recent musicological waters.

 

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¹Barry S. Brook, "Music Literature and Modern Communication," College Music Symposium 9 (1969): 48.

²Barry S. Brook, "Utilization of Data Processing Techniques in Music Documentation," Fontes Artis Musicae 12 (1965): 120.

³Eric H. Boehm, "Dissemination of Knowledge in the Humanities and the Social Sciences," American Council of Learned Societies Bulletin XIV, no. 5 (May 1963): 4.

⁴Barry S. Brook, "Music Documentation of the Future," in Musicology and the Computer, Musicology 1966-2000: A Practical Program (New York: City University of New York Press, 1970): 28.

⁵Florence Kretzschmar, ed., The Music Index Annual Cumulation 1962 (Detroit: Information Service, 1965): [xiii-xiv]. Not included in this figure are 22 additional titles representing the first year The Music Index began covering program notes from major symphony orchestras in the U.S. and Canada. They unfortunately discontinued indexing orchestral program notes in 1979.

⁶ProQuest Digital Dissertations ([Ann Arbor]: Bell & Howell Information and Learning, 2000), searched 28 May 2000. Search statement: SU(music) and DG(PhD) and DATE(=1950) [changing date as necessary]. Also note that these figures represent only participating U.S. and Canadian universities; this bibliography did not list music Ph.D. dissertations from any other countries for the dates examined, and a number of prominent U.S. and Canadian universities were also not represented. On world wide web (by subscription only): http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/gateway>

⁷Brook, "Music Documentation of the Future," 34. At the time of Brook's address in 1965, the most recently available cumulation of The Music Index was the 1962 volume, although a good number of the monthly update issues were likely also available at that time. The most recent volume of Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums in 1965 would have been the 1958-59 volume.

⁸Before the advent of The Music Index, some libraries (such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library) made efforts to index periodicals, but they were generally selective in nature and only available locally. For further discussion see Gillian B. Anderson, "Unpublished Periodical Indexes at the Library of Congress and Elsewhere in the United States of America," Fontes Artis Musicae 31, no. 1 (1984): 54-60.

⁹"Notes for NOTES," Notes 36, no. 2 (December 1979): 348.

¹⁰"Musicological Index: Communiqué du Secrétariat, juin 1955," Fontes Artis Musicae 2 (1955): 97-103.

¹¹Prices listed in the 1953 cumulative volume of Music Index: $25 for annual cumulative volume only, $125 for 12 monthly issues plus the cumulative volume; IAML's proposed Musicological Index would have consisted of tri-monthly issues per subscription year for $10. See Fontes Artis Musicae 2 (1955): 102.

¹²Brook's College Music Symposium article also appeared in slightly emended form in the following journals: Acta Musicologica 42, no. 3-4 (July-December 1970): 205-17; Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 2, no. 1 (January-March 1971): 9-19; and, as "Musikliteratur und Moderne Kommunikation. Zum Projekt RILM," in Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 13, no. 1 (1971): 18-30.

¹³"RILM material can be defined, in brief, as the results of systematic music study, research, and critical analysis and interpretation. . . . RILM excludes practical manuals and "how to" books; outlines for classroom use; articles from daily newspapers (with rare exceptions); reviews that are merely publication announcements, and—when they do not contain substantial written material—editions of music, recordings, program notes, and reviews of concerts." "Notes on using this book," RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 30 (1996): xii.

¹⁴For a detailed description of RILM's past and current production system, see Heather Platt, "RILM in the 1990s," Fontes Artis Musicae 43, no. 3 (July-September 1996): 298-302.

¹⁵Alan Green, RILM Abstracts Data Collection System (Rev 1.2) [formatted data transfer software], 28 August 1996, rev. 15 November 1998, http://www.rilm.org/submit2.html>

¹⁶Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, "RILM Abstracts of Music Literature," paper presented to the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers (ASIDIC), Orlando, Fla., 28 March 2000.

¹⁷For example, Johannes Streicher, "Le tesi in storia della musica discusse nelle università italiane: 1987/88-1992/93," Nuova rivista musicale italiana 28, no. 4 (1994): 683-779.

¹⁸"RILM Abstracts I/1 was published in August of 1967." Barry Brook, "The Road to RILM," in Modern Music Librarianship: Essays in Honor of Ruth Watanabe (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1989), 92. RILM Abstracts volume 1, number 1 contained citations appearing in print January-April 1967, resulting in the most recent citations occurring at a four month time lag.

¹⁹Nanna Schiødt, "1st Meeting of the Commission Mixte, Ljubljana, September 7, 1967," Fontes Artis Musicae 15, no. 1 (1968): 7.

²⁰The periodical titles included in the current citations project are listed on the RILM web site at http://www.rilm.org/prime-jt.html>

²¹"Notes on using this book," RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 30 (1996): xii.

²²An excellent web site for background information and tracking developments in this area is made available by the World Wide Web Consortium at http://www.w3.org/International/>

²³For additional information on the Unicode standard, consult http://www.unicode.org/>

²⁴NISC's BiblioLine web interface and the MuSe CD-ROM also permit searching for this type of data within its combined "Source/Notes" field.

²⁵Brook, "Music Literature and Modern Communication," 59.

²⁶International Index to Music Periodicals, Full Text Edition, http://iimpft.chadwyck.com/>

²⁷Search performed on JSTOR on 9 June 2000, http://www.jstor.org/>

²⁸A brief survey of RILM's currency for several music journals in 1997 revealed most titles with an indexing gap of less than two months. Alan Green, "RILM Abstracts of Music Literature on OCLC FirstSearch," posted 26 January 1997 on Music Library Association Mailing List , archived http://listserv.indiana.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9701D&L=mla-l&P=R2657>

²⁹"Send abstracts to RILM," RILM World-Wide Web Site, http://www.rilm.org/submit2.html>

³⁰RILM Commission Mixte, "RILM Guidelines: Approved 1989." Unpublished document available upon request from the RILM International Center, New York, NY.

³¹The first set of guidelines published by the RILM Commission Mixte appeared in Fontes Artis Musicae 15, no. 1 (1968): 3-8.

³²Thomas F. Heck, with Timothy Cherubini and Sean Ferguson, "Anything Goes? Issues in the Bibliographic Quality Control of Music Theses and Dissertations," in The Music Information Explosion and its Implications for College Teachers and Students, ed. by Thomas F. Heck (Missoula, MT: College Music Society, 1992), 58.