The Greek RISM Office: Describing Byzantine Music-Related Resources and Other Projects

Documenting Byzantine and post-Byzantine music sources in an online MARG-based system tailored to accommodate bibliographic and authority metadata primarily of Western art music is an unprecedented endeavor. The effort requires reliable information and methodical procedures to locate the music sources; it entails different expertise to analyse and identify the music pieces; it involves certain skills to organise the thesaurus of new terms extracted from the music manuscripts, and it involves deep knowledge of encoding music metadata. Additionally, the enrichment of the host institutions' authority records, with the purpose of expressing more attributes and relationships, is considered necessary, in order to create a functional guide serving as a prior stage to locate fonds-and-collections-related information in the database. To accomplish all of the above, the customisation and further development of the software is essential, with the aim of handling metadata according to current bibliographic and authority data models, and as a result, to respond effectively to the user's needs. This article refers to certain pilot projects undertaken by the Greek RISM Office using MUSCAT, RISM's central cataloguing program. It highlights all challenges, issues, and accomplishments regarding the encoding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine archival music resources, as well as authority metadata of music-related holding institutions in Greece.