The Database of Historical Music Collections is a project realized by the Music Department of the National Library of the Czech Republic with an institutional support for Long-term Conceptual Development of a Research Organization, financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and formally follows the activities of the Union Music Catalogue of the National Library of the Czech Republic. It is intended for the professional and general public with the aim of informing about the locations of musical sources in the Czech Republic. In addition to the function of a publicly accessible portal, capturing the current state of research and processing of historical documents of this specific type of cultural heritage, the database is also intended to provide a working space for researchers, students, archivists and librarians who can directly participate in its creation. The database is Czech-English, so it can serve not only Czech but also foreign users.

The Database of Historical Music Collections (based on the accessibility and updating of the collected data of all the previously implemented projects focused on the registration of musical sources in the Czech Republic) aims to create a platform for the next stage of this heuristic task. Systematic registration of musical sources has been carried out in the Czech Republic for more than 60 years. The establishment of the International Inventory of Musical Sources RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) in 1952 gave the impulse to start the research of musical sources in Czechoslovakia, to formulate cataloguing rules for musical documents and to build a central catalogue in which music collections should be processed. Already in 1956 Czechoslovakia joined the RISM project, thanks to the initiative of the music department of the State Library of the Czechoslovakia (now the National Library of the Czech Republic), which began sending records of rare Bohemian musical documents to the RISM Editorial Center. In 1965, this cooperation encouraged the establishment of a national central office for the registration of musical sources, the so-called Union Music Catalogue (hereafter simply referred to as UMC).

UMC is a central inventory of musical sources stored in Czech libraries, archives, museums, private collections and churches. The card catalogue, situated in the Music Department of the National Library of the Czech Republic, contains records of manuscript and printed music from the second half of the 17^th century to the end of the first half of the 20^th century (with the main focus between 1750 and 1850) from more than 180 Czech and Moravian collections (mostly church collections, but also monastery or chateau collections). The collections are stored in large state institutions such as the National Museum – Czech Museum of Music, Moravian Museum, state archives or libraries (e.g. the National Library of the Czech Republic, Moravian Library, Prague Conservatory Library, etc.). Around 400,000 musical documents are processed in the catalogue, while the total number of records, including "collections", is around one million. It is a system of several catalogues (in addition to the main location catalogue, there is also catalogue of authors, sheet music incipits, texts or genres). The UMC was created by the Czech musicologist and librarian Oldřich Pulkert (1929–2016) and his team. During the first ten years most of its current content was created. In addition to the staff of the Music Department, several dozen external musicologists participated in the research and cataloguing of the collections. Initially, the library carried out inventory work throughout Czechoslovakia, but as early as 1966, the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava took over the coordination of work in Slovakia and built its own Slovak Catalogue of Music-Historical Sources (SKHP, since 1967).

The stages of building the UMC in the following decades (which involved mainly in-depth revisions, research of sources and editorial activities) were significantly influenced by the personalities of the Music Department of the National Library: Jitřenka Pešková, Julius Hůlek and Zuzana Petrášková. Even though the UMC is not currently being updated in paper card form and the cataloguing of new collections is being continued only electronically (RISM), it is certainly not a closed project, but metaphorically an “institution” that represents the registration of musical sources in the Czech Republic.

Another important inventory project took place between 1960 and 1969, first at the then newly established Institute for the History of Music at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague (1958), and later, due to its dissolution in 1964, at the Institute of Musicology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The creation of the first register of all rare musical collections in Bohemia and Moravia began with an extensive questionnaire survey in 1960 and continued with field research (1965–1968), in which four Czech musicologists participated: Jaroslav Bužga, Jan Kouba, Eva Mikanová and Tomislav Volek (also Zdeněk Šesták externally). During this relatively short period of time, they collected reports from more than a thousand locations, only in Bohemia (the Moravian collections were left to the competence of the Moravian Museum in Brno). In addition to museums (177), archives (114) and libraries (20), they also visited over 700 churches and parochial offices. In addition to musical items, they also recorded surviving musical instruments, archival documents containing reports on music, archives of musical societies, correspondence of musicians or three-dimensional objects. The published Guide to Sources for the History of Music (Průvodce po pramenech k dějinám hudby) is the most comprehensive heuristic handbook of Czech musicology to date. Its fundamental contribution to music history research is undeniable, but after sixty years much of the information presented here needs to be thoroughly revised and updated. The use of the Guide as one of the key sources of the Database of Historical Music Collections is intended to be a tribute to its authors and an attempt to continue this difficult task.

The database also works with data from the 1971 publication Guide to the archival holdings of the Institute of the History of Music of the Moravian Museum in Brno (Průvodce po archivních fondech Ústavu dějin hudby Moravského muzea v Brně), which provides an overview of the music collections held by this institution (an inventory of acquisitions and additions was published in 2007).

The cooperation with the International Inventory of Musical Sources RISM, implemented by a Czech working group coordinated by the Music Department of the National Library of the Czech Republic, is continuously developed and forms an important part of this project. The RISM catalogue currently contains (in part or in full) about a one hundred Czech and Moravian collections, with more than 73,000 records. Another two hundred institutions with Czech sigla, registered in the RISM C series, have no attached records with musical sources, so it is appropriate to revise and complete this RISM directory during the new general survey of musical sources in Czech Republic.

Database of Historical Music Collections in the Czech Republic is focused on the original provenance of the sources. The place where the documents originated and were used, as well as their further fate and current place of storage constitute the main information, which is compiled either on the basis of physical examination of the surviving sources, processed cataloguing records (in UMC, RISM and other catalogues) or reports from the literature (Guide to Sources for the History of Music and others). The registration of sources in the UMC or RISM is the next important information that the database provides, and our aim (within the Czech RISM working group) is to catalogue, recatalogue (from the UMC to RISM) or initiate the processing of musical documents. Another important part of each record in database is related bibliography and citations from both Guides.

We consider one of the main benefits of the database to be the possibility of searching and sorting information available only in internal card catalogues and the above-mentioned printed publications. The keywords or types of institutions, as well as the iindexes of locations and personal names, are designed to provide a logical, intuitive way to search the records and to use all available informations in one database. However, it must be said that the processing of records and the addition of all relevant data in the database will be done in a sequential manner.

As the name suggests, the database is primarily focused on the registration of “historical” music collections. The question remains how to approach 20^th and 21^st century musical sources, such as the musical estates of Czech composers or the sheet music archives of still active musical or theatre ensembles. Although the database is dedicated to sources of early music (especially sheet music), in the future it is possible to use the database also for collections of a later periods or other types of sources (e.g. musical instruments or archival material).

Eliška Šedivá

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HELFERT, Vladimír: Státní hudebně historický ústav, Praha: Hudební matice Umělecké besedy 1945.

KOUBA, Jan (ed.) a kol.: Průvodce po pramenech k dějinám hudby: fondy a sbírky uložené v Čechách [Guide to Sources for the History of Music: Collections Deposited in Bohemia], Praha: Academia 1969.

KYAS, Vojtěch: Průvodce po archivních fondech II: Oddělení dějin hudby Moravského zemského muzea: přírůstky za léta 1971-2001 a doplňky, Brno: Moravské zemské muzeum 2007. ISBN 978-80-7028-305-9.

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PUKL, Oldřich: Zpráva o průzkumu pramenů k dějinám české hudby 20. století, in: Hudební věda, vol. 6 (1967), p. 504-526.

PULKERT, Oldřich: Důležitá věc se uskutečňuje, in: Hudební rozhledy, vol. 19, no. 20 (1966), p. 617-618.

STRAKOVÁ, Theodora – SEHNAL, Jiří – PŘIBÁŇOVÁ, Svatava: Průvodce po archivních fondech Ústavu dějin hudby Moravského muzea v Brně, Brno: Ústav dějin hudby Moravského musea v Brně 1971.

VOLEK, Tomislav: Cestou za prameny, in: Hudební rozhledy, vol. 22, no. 6 (1969), p. 170-173.