Digitised publications in the
RILM Music Encyclopedias

At the beginning of this year, two classic publications of the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography, the Encyclopedia of Music (2^nd edition, 1971–1977) and the Lexicon of Yugoslav Music (1984), were included in the RILM Music Encyclopedias, an international electronic collection of music encyclopedias and lexicons.

The presentation of this project was held on 15 March in the institute’s Great Hall, in the presence of numerous respected musicologists and representatives of major media companies.

Dr Bruno Kragić, the director general of the Institute of Lexicography, greeted all present and expressed his satisfaction that the Institute’s publications are available in the international repertoire of music encyclopedias.

Dr Filip Hameršak, director of the Institute of Lexicography, pointed out that the Institute has been publishing online as well as digitised classic editions for more than fifteen years, based on the principle of open access through the Institute’s portal. However, this kind of inclusion in the global database significantly increases their international visibility and accessibility, and thus their level of global relevance.

Marijana Pintar, senior lexicographer, editor of music and ballet in the Croatian Biographical Dictionary, presented the aforementioned publications of the Institute of Lexicography as well as the history of their origin. She emphasised that these publications were included in the project because they are still indispensable for the history of Croatian music in many aspects even today. She reminded that the editor of the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Music, printed in two volumes in 1958 and 1963, was Josip Andreis, a pioneer of modern Croatian musical historiography, while the editor of the expanded second edition was Krešimir Kovačević, who was also the editor of the Lexicon of Yugoslav Music, which is still an invaluable publication that has preserved valuable data about persons, institutions, and music associations. In addition, Pintar emphasised that the »old« but largely non-obsolete publications of the Institute of Lexicography gained a new global recognition through this project.

The initiative for cooperation with the RILM institute (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) came from Dr Zdravko Blažeković, executive editor of RILM. Dr Blažeković presented the history and activities of that institute, which was founded in New York in 1967, with the task of compiling a bibliography of world music. Today RILM includes 1,300,000 bibliographic items (with the addition of about 75,000 new items per year) covering all types of music published in numerous languages.

The RILM Music Encyclopedias are a special example of these efforts, a digital repository of music encyclopedias and lexicons, originally published in printed form. The project started ten years ago, and today the repository contains 65 encyclopedias from all areas of music (general music encyclopedias, national encyclopedias, encyclopedias of instruments and music theory) published in 12 languages. Most of these encyclopedias have not been digitised before.

Every year, several new titles are added to the repository and, in January 2023, these included two publications of the Institute of Lexicography. Considering that the repository enables a comprehensive search of its content, and that it is one of the components included in the EBSCO database, Croatian musicians and works of music have therefore been integrated into a worldwide repertoire of music and musicology.

The Press:
Due edizioni accessibili a livello globale
Predstavljanje projekta uvrštenja muzičkih enciklopedija u svjetsku elektroničku zbirku
Hrvatska muzikološka literatura dostupna u svjetskom virtualnom repozitoriju

Photo: Andrea Holenda