RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales)*RISM is an international collective undertaking with the aim of comprehensively documenting surviving music sources anywhere in the world. Established in 1952 by the International Musicological Society and International Association of Music Libraries. The goal of RISM is to locate and catalog all surviving musical sources dating from the earliest times to about 1800, and in doing so to bring them to the attention of a much wider public.
Series A/II: Music manuscripts after 1600, is a database offers around 700,000 mainly manuscript sources cataloged in detail according to academic criteria. The manuscripts are currently stored in hundreds of libraries and archives around the world. They pass down to later generations the musical works of 30,000 composers. The catalog was made possible through cooperation between the International Inventory of Musical Sources (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, RISM for short), the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and the State Library of Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). The catalog entries comprise, among other things, information about the composers (including dates of birth and death), title, instrumentation and casting requirements of the works, as well as references to them in the specialist literature. The manuscripts themselves are described in detail in respect of scribe, and place and time of origin. In addition, practically every work can also be identified unambiguously by means of a music incipit. A variety of search fields makes it possible to investigate not only according to particular composers, work titles, or performance forces, but also by place and time of origin or various people like librettists, previous owners, or dedicatees.