product header background

Summary of Activities, 2025−2026

1 July 2025 through 30 June 2026

Overview

The past year marked a period of consolidation, expansion, and strategic transformation for RILM, and also brought several important institutional milestones. A major development was the renaming of the Index to Printed Music, as the RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions (RISE) in September 2025, along with an expanded scope. In December, RILM relaunched the Hofmeister XIX database under its aegis. RILM’s engagement with UNESCO and the international cultural heritage community deepened. At the International Center, RILM worked hard on content growth, which remained steady across all resources. Following its launch last May, the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines prepared to add 12 new titles. RILM Abstracts continued to expand its global coverage through the work of editors, contributors, and national committees, while RILM Abstracts with Full Text just marked its tenth anniversary. Over time, nearly 60 journals have been added to it, with 30 more in the pipeline. RILM Music Encyclopedias expanded with titles from Guatemala, France, and Italy, bringing the total to 75. DEUMM Online released 161 articles, with a total number of newly published articles of nearly 500 since launch. MGG Online introduced a redesigned advanced search feature incorporating Boolean operators, now implemented across RILM’s encyclopedic resources. Additional advances behind the scenes included significant developments in authority data, metadata structures, and editorial systems, strengthening discoverability and interoperability across platforms. Investments in artificial intelligence, workflow automation, and modernized infrastructure improved efficiency while maintaining RILM’s longstanding commitment to expert human editorial oversight. Together, these developments reflect an organization that is both preserving six decades of scholarly excellence and actively building the foundations for the future of music research.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (with Full Text)

Overview: RILM Abstracts remains the core of RILM’s operations and continues to grow as the world’s most comprehensive bibliography of music scholarship. As of 17 July 2026, RILM Abstracts contained 1,455,936 bibliographic records and 177,100 reviews (excluding shell records), reflecting the continuing expansion of music research worldwide. This growth, however, presents an increasing editorial challenge. The volume of scholarly literature now substantially exceeds RILM’s current editorial capacity, resulting in expanding backlogs of records awaiting indexing and citation verification. Although the continuous development of the editorial database over the past 15 years has greatly improved editorial efficiency and reduced processing time, technological improvements alone cannot compensate for the increasing volume and linguistic diversity of global scholarship. Additional editorial staff will be essential if RILM is to maintain the timely, comprehensive coverage that has long distinguished the database.

A central priority remains strengthening coverage of scholarship from underrepresented regions, particularly Asia. While important progress has been made through collaborations in China, India, and elsewhere, the rapid growth of musicological publishing in Asian languages has outpaced available editorial expertise. Expanding editorial capacity in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, Korean, and other Asian languages is therefore essential both for reducing existing backlogs and for ensuring balanced global representation of music scholarship.

RILM’s international role continues to expand through new institutional partnerships. During the past year, collaborations were strengthened with the Archive and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology in Gurugram, India, and a new partnership was established with the African Musicology Institute, while RILM also initiated a collaboration with Sultan Qaboos University in Oman following the successful completion of its partnership with the Institut du monde arabe in Paris. These initiatives further reinforce RILM’s commitment to increasing the visibility of music scholarship from regions that have historically been underrepresented in international bibliographic resources.

This mission has gained additional significance through RILM’s accreditation by UNESCO. UNESCO’s emphasis on international cooperation, cultural diversity, and the safeguarding of cultural heritage closely aligns with RILM’s longstanding commitment to documenting music scholarship from every region, culture, and linguistic tradition. Strengthening global editorial capacity is therefore not only an operational necessity but also central to RILM’s international responsibilities.

At the same time, RILM has continued to invest in its editorial infrastructure through strategic staff appointments, organizational restructuring, and the continued refinement of editorial workflows and automation. Looking ahead, RILM will continue to prioritize expanding editorial expertise, reducing processing backlogs, strengthening international collaborations, and integrating artificial intelligence into editorial workflows to enhance abstracting, indexing, and bibliographic data management while maintaining RILM’s editorial standards.

Annual growth of RILM Abstracts: In 2025–26, 72,780 new bibliographic records were added to the database (not including records that have not been citation checked). Editors indexed 56,135 records, the highest number since the 2020 lockdown.

Indexing: The following headwords were used during 2025–26 for the first time:

  • artificial intelligence (AI)
  • French dance (outside France)
  • instrument builders–bass shawm
  • instrument builders–chirimía
  • instrument builders–mechanical singing birds
  • instrument builders–player organ
  • instrument builders–precorder
  • Nigerien music (outside Niger)
  • performers–davul
  • performers–dvojnice
  • performers–electric viola
  • performers–lục huyền cầm
  • performers–santur
  • performers–tzouras
  • Singaporean music (outside Singapore)

Full-text coverage overview: The RAFT team had another excellent year, maintaining a smooth workflow and steady progress across all processing levels while also navigating staff changes during the second half of the fiscal year. As of 30 June 2026, RILM’s editorial database contained 628,007 PDFs—an increase of over 29,757 PDF records imported since 1 July 2025. This is fewer than in previous years, when the team acquired and processed not only new long-run titles but also a substantial number of loaned gap-filling materials. We closed the FY with fewer than 25,000 unchecked PDFs, including 6,846 unattached reviews and less than 4,000 unchecked PDFs in staging journals (scheduled for release in subsequent years). As of 1 July 2026, 589,282 PDFs are available on EBSCOhost.

The seventh annual installment of new full-text journals is scheduled for summer 2026. The eleven new titles comprise over 720 issues/27,639 PDFs, representing seven countries (Austria, Germany, Japan, Romania, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S.) and five languages. Five of these titles will be available online exclusively through RAFT.

  • Eisenstädter Haydn-Berichte. Wien: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2002–. ISSN 2616-8979
  • Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955–. ISSN 0075-2681
  • Journal of music theory and transcultural music studies. Isparta: Genç Bilge Yayıncılık, 2023–. ISSN 3023-7335
  • Liszt journal: Jahrbuch der Liszt Akademie Raiding. Wien: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2024–. ISSN 3061-0451
  • Lucrări de muzicologie/Musicology papers. Cluj-Napoca: Conservatorul de Muzică G. Dima, 2009–. ISSN 1222-894X/2068-8601 and eISSN 1222-894X/2285-0031
  • Meshk journal of religious music. Istanbul: Istanbul University Press/İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayinlari, 2024–. eISSN 3062-0430
  • Music cognition. Cluj-Napoca: MediaMusica, 2017–. ISSN 2601-3193 and eISSN 2601-3207
  • Newsletter of the Dvořák Society for Czech and Slovak Music. Newcastle-under-Lyme: Dvořák Society for Czech and Slovak Music, 1988–. ISSN 0000-0000
  • Notes: Quarterly journal of the Music Library Association. Middleton: Music Library Association, 1934–. ISSN 0027-4380 and eISSN 1534-150X
  • 音楽教育学 [Ongaku kyōikugaku]. Koganei: Nihon Ongaku Kyōiku Gakkai/The Japan Music Education Society, 1971–. ISSN 0289-6907
  • Senfl-Studien. Wien: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2012–18. ISSN 2716-2534

RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions (RISE)

Overview: This year saw a major change: the Index to Printed Music was renamed the RILM Index to Scores and Collected Editions (RISE) as of September 2025. RISE had a productive year, with consistent record growth along with the addition of important features that will continue to improve user searchability. At the end of FY 2026, RISE contained 561,147 published individual piece records (PMs), 12,457 of which include open-access links; 34,687 published CW records; and 1,949 distinct series.

The historical mission of the Index to Printed Music still provides the foundation for our editorial work; what RISE introduces is an expanded scope, incorporating born-digital editions as well as more materials outside the Western classical sphere where applicable. For the past year, our focus has been to add more value to RISE through multiple avenues. This includes accessing new print editions, finding open-access links to include, and linking records to bolster the new preferred title feature. In the past year, we have added 2,000 more links to open-access content through both new accessions and additions to existing records. RISE includes scores in 104 languages, published in 57 countries on six continents; this count is imperfect, as it only includes countries of publication, and does not necessarily mean music from other countries is not indexed. 

Two major features have been implemented to RISE by our partner EBSCO: the addition of a publisher number field to join other identifying numbers like ISBN and ISMN, and a hyperlinked preferred title field to connect works across publishers and editions. 

Several ongoing projects–preferred titles, instrument equivalencies, works with unhelpful and generic titles, IPM collections, display AK records—are aimed at improving RISE by updating legacy metadata structures from the pre-RILM era. These remnants of the older database’s style and various inconsistencies can cause problems for effective user searching on EBSCOhost and need to be addressed.

RILM Music Encyclopedias (RME)

Content: In January 2026, RILM Music Encyclopedias added three new titles, bringing the list of titles to 75, published in print from 1775 to the present, and containing 354,633 entries. The additions included titles that focus on Guatemala, France, and Italy, reflecting RILM’s global and inclusive mission:

  • Igor de Gandarias. Diccionario de la música en Guatemala (rev. ed.; Ciudad de Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 2024) xv, 193 p. In Spanish.
  • Frank Daykin. The encyclopedia of French art song: Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc(Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2013)vi, 739 p. In English.
  • Walter Brunetto. Piccolo vocabolario etnomusicologico: Forme, stili, repertori e contesti della musica di tradizione orale italiana (Roma: Squilibri, 2012). In Italian.

Coming updates and additions: In addition to the quarterly updates to Komponisten der Gegenwart and to new search-term equivalencies, the following new titles are planned for inclusion in 2027 and 2028:

  • Roberto Leydi and Sandra Mantovani, Dizionario della musica popolare europea (Milano: Bompiani, 1970) 316 p. In Italian.
  • Emmett G. Price III, Tammy L. Kernodle, and Horace J. Maxile Jr., eds., Encyclopedia of African American Music, 3 vols. (Oxford: Greenwood, 2010) xlix, 1069 p. In English.
  • Hugo Riemann, ed. Musik-Lexikon (5th edition; Leipzig: Max Hesse’s Verlag, 1900) xxiii, 1284 p. In German.

MGG Online

Overview: MGG Online will celebrate its tenth anniversary in October 2026. Over the past decade, RILM and its publishing partners, Bärenreiter and J.B. Metzler (part of the Springer Nature publishing group), have worked together to develop and sustain this venture, continually refining it in response to advances in scholarship and technology, as well as the insights gained through experience and collaboration. To mark this milestone, we are preparing presentations for the annual conferences of IAML Germany and the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, along with a refreshed brochure and updated print and online promotional materials.

Product development: A redesigned advanced search feature incorporating Boolean operators has been developed and implemented across MGG Online, DEUMM Online, and RME. In addition, MGG Online news publishing, previously managed through an inadequately customized utility embedded in the delivery system, is now done via a newly developed application in the editorial system, streamlining editorial and translation workflows.

Content: Over the past year, MGG Online has expanded its content by more than 100 articles, including substantial updates to existing entries, newly commissioned articles, and entirely new topics. Notable additions include articles on hip hop, a cappella (popular music), the home organ, the Hammond organ, and the Canadian city of Ottawa. As part of MGG Online’s all-new emerging thematic series on film music, there are new entries on the film composers/arrangers Carl Stalling (1891–1973), Scott Bradley (b.1977), and Mychael Dana (b.1958). Additional highlights encompass Patricia Matusky’s newly written contribution on Malaysia, new entries on Marianne Faithful (1946–2025), the German rock band the Puhdys, British composer Albert Ketèlbey (1875–1959), the Japanese composer and performer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023), German ethnomusicologist Britta Sweers, and the musicologists Lothar Schmidt, Thomas Seedorf, Andreas Jaschinski, and Gianmario Borio, among others. Further entries are currently in preparation on the topics of humanism and sound studies, as well as on Yoko Ono (b. 1933), Tom Waits (b. 1949), Sinéad O’Connor (1966–2023), Jonny Greenwood (b. 1971), and the American rock bands The Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M., and Tool.

DEUMM Online

During the past year, DEUMM published 161 new articles (123 biographies and 38 topical articles). The total number of newly published articles at the end of June 2026 is 481. The goal of the editorial team is to publish on average one article every other day, which is not easy to achieve, since some articles require substantial editorial and tagging work. We keep a healthy supply of new articles ready to be worked on. It is promising that the scholarly community, both in Italy and globally, is eager to contribute new entries. DEUMM has several authors continuously approaching us for collaboration. In the newly published article, we try to balance between the canonical composers of Western music, small masters that are being newly studied, and topical headwords.

RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM)

The RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM), which launched in May 2025, just celebrated its first anniversary as a landmark product that documents popular music history through its digitized, fully searchable collection of independently published popular music magazines and fanzines. The RAPMM collection currently includes 127 such titles, with 12 more to be added on 1 July 2026. This growing collection fills critical gaps in archival offerings and increases the accessibility of publications that are often rare and available only to those who can afford to purchase copies or travel and gain access to the physical archives where such publications might be found. RAPMM aligns with the principles of the UNESCO 2003 and 2005 Conventions by preserving and promoting cultural diversity through access to these materials, and it embodies RILM’s commitment to safeguarding cultural heritage and fostering inclusive research methodologies across musical traditions. RAPMM deepens RILM’s mission by complementing its existing resources, providing music researchers with materials that highlight the global impact and evolving narratives of popular culture.

Books and e-books

Currently, two titles—the third edition of RILM’s style manual (2023) and Music’s intellectual history (2009), edited by Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie—are available via EBSCOhost Collections Manager and Gobi. Institutions that do not currently subscribe to EBSCO may contact ebookinfo@ebsco.com for additional options, and individuals interested in purchasing the book can contact an affiliated library. A fourth edition of the style manual, to be available in print and via EBSCOhost Collections Manager and Gobi, is in preparation, with a projected release in the fall of 2026.

Platforms hosting RILM resources

All RILM databases are available by subscription on EBSCOhost or Egret, the RILM platform, or both:

  • RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (with Full Text): EBSCOhost
  • Index to Printed Music: EBSCOhost
  • RILM Music Encyclopedias: EBSCOhost and Egret
  • MGG Online: Egret
  • DEUMM Online: Egret
  • RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines: Egret
  • E-Books: EBSCOhost

Bibliolore

RILM’s blog, Bibliolore, continues to be very active, with new posts every week and increasing numbers of viewers.  Bibliolore posts draw from RILM resources, including RILM Music Encyclopedias, MGG Online, DEUMM Online, RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines, RILM Abstracts with Full Text, and feature content relevant to global music studies, from Western music to popular music; many are inspired by birthdays, observance days/months, and contemporary topical issues. As in previous years, Bibliolore continues to celebrate musical figures–both well-known ones, like Brian Wilson, Selena, Jimmy Cliff, and Joan Jett, as well as less-known artists such as Poly Styrene, Bechara El-Khoury, and Francis Bebey. In February, a series of posts was initiated commemorating RILM’s 60th anniversary in 2026, focusing on RILM’s history as an organization, its use of computer technology, the early days of author and librarian submissions, classification systems, early abstract cards, and its global network of committees and partnerships.  Here are the top ten posts (hyperlinked with the original posting date) from the past year:

PostViews
Smithsonian Collections Object: The Sony TPS-L2 “Walkman” Cassette Player, National Museum of American History (4 March 2020)5,602
Youssou N’Dour, cultural ambassador for African music (25 September 2024)3,707
Paganini and Marfan syndrome (27 October 2022)3,629
Mahler and Beyoncé (19 October 2011)1,388
Debussy and gamelan (22 August 2022)1,127
“Asadoya yunta”: An Okinawan song’s history (10 November 2023)728
Musical expressions of the Harlem Renaissance: An annotated bibliography (19 April 2024)521
Central America’s vast dance and musical heritage (26 September 2023)509
The Wanamaker organ (29 March 2011)478
Rousseau and Aunt Rhody (28 June 2012)442

This year’s top 10 list continues to show how many older Bibliolore posts continue to live on well after their initial posting date. Classic posts, such as Mahler and Beyoncé from 2011 and the Smithsonian Collections Object from 2020, which is this year’s top post, still garner hundreds of hits monthly. Newer favorites, such as the posts on the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, “Asadoya yunta” (An Okinawan song’s history), Central American music and dance heritage, and an annotated bibliography on the Harlem Renaissance’s musical expressions represent new directions for Bibliolore in highlighting RILM’s diverse global content.

Bibliolore has published more than 1,869 posts and has been viewed more than 1,134,387 times since its inception in October 2009. Views since June 2025 averaged 346 per day. The site currently has over 2,600 subscribers, and its Facebook page has 124 followers.

WeChat

RILM’s WeChat account continues to grow as a vital platform for engaging Chinese-speaking audiences with musicological research and resources. The account shares news about RILM, highlights scholarly trends through its databases, and features translated articles (with permission), helping to connect global music research with Chinese readers. In FY 2025, four posts were published and total views increased to over 168,117, with unique views counted per IP address. By the end of the FY, the account had surpassed 10,400 followers, reflecting the platform’s expanding reach and influence. Figures on individual posts published in FY 2025 (in order of popularity):

PostViews
Another Chinese Journal Has Been Fully Indexed by a World-Renowned Database! (28 January 2026)2,402
Memories of Shanghai Jazz Bars in 1995 (26 August 2025)1,476
Overseas Chinese Music Research 2025 (11 May 2026)1,289
Announcement of the International Symposium on the Protection and Transmission of Musical Intangible Cultural Heritage along the “Belt and Road” (No. 1) (26 January 2026)920

RILM’s WeChat account has published 60 posts altogether and has been viewed more than 160,000 times since its inception in November 2020, with an average of 2,850 views per article.