Harrassowitz and RIPM

In  my involvement with this internship, I have become, obviously, quite familiar with the vendor Harrassowitz (discussed in an earlier blog entry).  They are, as it would have, our major vendor for European scores at the IU Music Library.  Music, however, only makes up 3% of the company's holdings, which kind of blows my mind as a student who has had to pour through pages and pages of simply their Collected Works, as well as order from their main catalog.  

A few weeks ago, Harrassowitz officially announced its partnership with RIPM, or the Retrospective Index of Music Periodicals, and will now be offering it through the platform of RIPMPlus.  Not only will this make maintaining one's subscription to RIPM more easily managed, but Harrassowitz plans to add some upgrades to the RIPM platform, making it much more accessible to its users. 

Both the RIPM Index and the RIPM Archive are updated twice a year with new titles, and both are accessed on the RIPMPlus platform. Among the unique features of RIPMPlus are:

• a translation module that translates entries in the RIPM Retrospective Index from RIPM’s 14 languages to any of 52 user-selected languages
• easy selection of periodicals from a single drop-down window
• cross-language “search expanders” that retrieve all forms of names and terms.
• drop-down virtual keyboards for searching in non-Roman characters (e.g. Russian)

A demonstration of this, along with its unveiling will occur at the Music Library Association's national meeting in Dallas, February 16-19th.  I will be attending, so this is one of the many vendor booths I intend on visiting to better understand both the process of vendor-library relations, as well as new vendor initiatives to make themselves more marketable to their customer base (aka: Collection Developers).