Tools and Services

The RISM project comprises a unique dataset, one of the most significant Big Data collaborative efforts in the humanities, and is of fundamental importance to musicological research. An effective data management is instrumental in bringing these data to the public and encouraging their use, helping at an international level to design standards and best practices regarding music sources in the digital domain.

The RISM Digital Center has contributed to the digital infrastructure of the RISM project for many years. It leads the development of Muscat, the open-source web application used by the RISM community for inventorying sources and curating data worldwide. It is also responsible for the installation and administration of Muscat.

The RISM Digital Center also created and maintains Verovio, an open-source software library for rendering MEI scores. In this context, the center is also actively involved in the development of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), as expert for the definition of the standard, as user, and also as promoter in research projects. The MEI schema includes encoding of the music notation but also very rich metadata header that can, for example, be imported directly from the RISM catalogue records.

Furthermore, the RISM Digital Center participated in the initial development of Diva.js, a widely-used open-source IIIF web-based document viewer optimised for high-resolution image collections.