• Patrizia Rebulla

Archivo Storico Ricordi, Milan

The music publishing industry is little studied, in part because of a scarcity of primary sources able to shed light on its history and decision-making processes.  The Archivio Storico Ricordi, however, provides a remarkably rich and complete insight into two hundred years of music publishing. The archive is so comprehensive for two main reasons.  Firstly because of the continuity in its history - the Ricordi publishing house was founded in 1808 by Giovanni Ricordi, and until 1919 remained a family business (run by his son, grandson and great-grandson) Even when the leadership passed into its management hands, it kept a remarkable continuity of habits. Secondly, despite two world wars, what was done on a daily basis was accurately stored in the impressive collection of company correspondence, totalling 30,000 original letters and almost 600,000 copyletters. When the decision was made to offer web access to the archival records, this letter collection seemed the ideal access point.

In the nineteenth century, Ricordi was one of the largest music publishing houses in the world, and its network extended over the continents. The music business was a multi-layered enterprise, that actively involved not only the company managers and their skills, but also composers and librettists, stage designers, illustrators, conductors, singers, artists, managers and theatre impresarios, without forgetting private customers who simply wanted to purchase a score or a libretto, and journalists who regularly updated the audience with reviews and information on new releases. Before the invention of the telephone and other communication mediums, writing it on a piece of paper was the only effective way to get anything done. This trove of information – safely stored in the vaults of the archive – provides  invaluable witnesses of how decisions were taken and what were the relations between Ricordi and the rest of the world. Giving access to the collections through the letters will allow generations of scholars to study a forgotten industry that made the history of music.

• Valeria Luti

Archivo Storico Ricordi, Milan

When the Archivio Storico Ricordi was created in 1994, all the catalogues and metadata relating to the collection only existed in paper form.  However, the unique and comprehensive archive is of critical interest to scholars all over the world, and it receives daily requests for access to its documents.  Providing this access is not straightforward – the archive is not open to the public and its collections can only be accessed by transporting documents to the reading room of the National Library (the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, hosted within the same building as the archive).  From the very earliest days of the Archivo, the necessity of using  digital techniques to establish electronic catalogues and metadata was recognised as crucial, both in providing scholars with information about what the archive contained but also in tracking where the archive’s documents actually were.

The labour-intensive process began of inputting data from paper records into Excel and Access files, data formats that were in widespread use at the time, but which subsequently have not provided the sustainability or functionality required for the Archivio’s very complex collection, not only of documents, but also photographs, scores and iconographic documents.  Subsequently, the need to apply a more coherent structure to the archive’s dataset was recognised, and a FileMaker database was created and, in the process of ingesting the existing files, data was standardised, reorganised and restructured.  But even this approach proved problematic, as it was difficult to make the contents available online.

This paper will examine how the same fundamental concerns – wider public access, and creating comprehensive catalogues and metadata about the archive’s collection – have driven the archive’s digital endeavours over the past two decades, and how our approach has evolved as technology has changed.  It describes the challenges of creating a dataset that incorporates but also supplements previous incarnations of that dataset.  It discusses the difficulty of integrating datasets and the alternative challenge of synchronising data across different technical solutions.

• Katherine Rogers

University of Sheffield

The Archivio Storico Ricordi is a particularly rich and diverse dataset, containing two hundred years of material relating both to music and to the business of music in a variety of formats – musical scores, photographs, correspondence, business documents.  However, the approach to digitising the archive had been similarly varied, both in terms of formats and approaches used and in prioritising what has been digitised.

Software solutions that evolve over years represent one of the biggest sustainability issues that faces those engaged in the digital humanities.  It is almost impossible to accurately maintain documentation, and over time, the rationale behind technically sound decisions may become less clear.  The process of moving data to a more modern architecture can be an invaluable opportunity to retrospectively model your dataset and to analyse errors that may have crept into your data during its evolution.  

This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of this process for the Archivio Storico Ricordi working in conjunction with the University of Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute.  The collaboration brought together the Archivo’s expert knowledge about the archive’s data with the DHI’s expertise in data modelling, particularly ontological approaches. It will describe how the move from FileMaker to a MySQL database lead to improvements in the quality of the dataset, and facilitated the explicit modelling of entities and relationships that had previously been implicit and not always validated.   It will also address the challenges of carrying out this process remotely, in two different countries.  What can you do when your data isn’t quite as “described on the tin”?

• George Ionita

University of Sheffield

The letters within the Archivio Storico Ricordi collection can be seen as central to the archives, connecting, as they do, all the different entities within the ontological model that represents the archive's dataset.  The richly descriptive texts provide intricate details of the relationships between people, places, theatres, performances, manuscripts and stage descriptions, recorded over two hundred years.  The Digital Humanities Institute has created an innovative online editing workbench that allows staff at the Archivio Storico Ricordi to simultaneously edit the letters (both in English and Italian), whilst linking segments of letter text to existing entities within the database (or to create new entities).

The Digital Humanities Institute designed the workbench with regard to the working practices of the archival staff, developing use-cases for the type of functionality that they required from such a tool.  The workbench is intended not only to enable efficient digitisation of the archive's letters, but also to create a dataset that provides the basis for a website that will allow the public to explore the rich network of relationships between entities.   For example, a user might want to visualise all letters sent by Giacomo Puccini between the years 1891 - 1899, or letters where the opera “Aida” was mentioned, and where the topic of the letter was a payment or a contract.

This paper explores the importance of understanding an organisation's data model and working practices to create effective tools that support digitisation and the integration of new data into an existing dataset. The aim is to promote sustainability but also to allow data to be queried and visualised in ways that allow new insights into an archive's collection. This paper will conclude by considering the future for the Archivio Storico Ricordi, including approaches such as crowd-sourcing transcriptions.