Bibliotecas e investigación musical

Abstract

Not a long time ago it was a little difficult to defend the high level of research needed by the librarian in charge of a music collection. There were not many libraries specialized on this subject. Nowadays we have seen in Spain the revaluation of the collections of music schools, art academies, etc. and we count with several musical documentation centres specialized in a composer or a geographic area. There are also an old international project recently established in Spain, the RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), and others national plans working now, like Musica Inedita, of the Royal Palace library, or Instrumenta Musicae, directed by the National Library of Spain, that collects the information of musical documents of the 19th century kept in the national libraries of Spain and Latin America. A correct description of musical documents demands the use of reference works and bibliographic tools about composers, writers, title names, publishers or dates of publication. The result, condensed in a bibliographic record, normally brief, must be reliable in all his parts.