The Virtual Library of Musicology (ViFaMusik) (http://www.vifamusik.de) is one of the latest and most ambitious attempts to create a meta-site of online resources relevant to music scholars. A joint project of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, and the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, it is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The most impressive of its two main services is a single search engine that simultaneously mines multiple large depositories, such as library catalogues, RISM, and online resources providing digitized publications and primary sources. The other significant service is a Digital Collections area that lists hotlinks to worldwide libraries and organizations that provide free online digitized copies of some of their holdings. The ViFa site offers both German and English versions, however the language selected might impact not only the display of the ViFa pages, but also the search results, and some special announcements on the homepage (including updates regarding the expansion of the ViFa project itself) are only available in German.Footnote ¹ Since its initial phase of implementation in July 2005 to June 2007, this project has continued to improve and expand: the institutions and services on which it draws provide updates, including information about new acquisitions and recently published journal articles; and catalogues of significant libraries are being added to the searchable datasets. Although ViFa covers a huge array of material, this review deals primarily with searches and services relevant to nineteenth-century music in the western world.

In some respects, the search engine is the site's most significant innovation: numerous other sites, including that of the American Musicological Society, provide hotlinks to a variety of resources of interest to music scholars, but this tool enables a researcher to perform a single search that simultaneously accesses data from an impressive array of sources. The main data sources are grouped into five categories: library catalogues; bibliographic databases; ‘web resources’; ‘community of scholars’; and ‘full text offerings’. In addition to the single search tool, each of these datasets may be searched individually or in any combination. The library catalogues encompass the printed music collection at the British Library; MusicOPAC at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek (the catalogue of scores, AV-material, digital media, microforms, music literature, and music journals owned by the BSB); the music catalogue of the Berlin State Library; and the Historical Scores of the Bavarian State Opera. The bibliographic databases include RISM, RIdIM, the Bayerisches Musikerlexikon online, and a substantial journal database. The ‘community of scholars’ dataset includes European scholars (and their areas of specialization) and research institutes/projects. This section also provides a hotlink to the Dissertationsmeldestelle der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, which facilitates searches for Austrian, Swiss and German dissertations. The data set labelled ‘full text offerings’ includes the digitized music literature holdings of the BSB (more on this below) and a digitized version of the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Albrecht Riethmüller; further additions are planned.

For users searching for publications on a given topic, the BSB and Berlin State Library catalogues and the journal database (which can all be searched simultaneously) are among the most useful. Although the catalogues represent the holdings of only two libraries, the ViFa software can access the location of the user's computer and, via WorldCat, it shows the nearby libraries holding the book or journal article the researcher has selected; the user may then select a specific library and the software retrieves the exact call number of the publication. The journal database searches the tables of contents of all the major music history, theory and ethnomusicology journals from around the world. It covers volumes published since 1994 and the provider states that it is updated daily. In addition to locating specific articles, users may also view tables of contents of the most recent issue of each journal. Since the catalogue and the journal database are regularly updated, searches will sometimes locate publications that have yet to appear in RILM.

The digitized collection of the music department of the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek is another impressive aspect of ViFaMusik. This resource provides and searches the full text of monographs and journals about music published between 1800 and 1870. At the moment, this collection contains approximately two thousand digitized works. For scholars specializing in reception history, this is a particularly useful tool: in a single search one can locate nineteenth-century reactions to works such as Beethoven's Fidelio, or the performances of the singer Elise Polko (a member of the Mendelssohn circle). Unfortunately, for scholars searching by subject, rather than by author or title of publication, there does not appear to be an easy and straightforward way to ascertain exactly what publications have been digitized. To be sure, similar difficulties are encountered when using other digitized services and collections, and at least with this site, unlike others, the user is informed of the time period during which the material was originally published. A thorough scholar will no doubt also perform searches at other sites, including the European Library (www.theeuropeanlibrary.org), Zeno.org, or the HathiTrust Digital Library (http://www.hathitrust.org), as well as some of the libraries listed in ViFa's Digitial Collections. For instance, a search for Glinka in the BSB digitized collection at the ViFaMusik site resulted in 120 hits, including mostly articles in German music journals, as well as catalogues and lexicons. By contrast, searches for Glinka in full-text digitized publications, which had originally been published from 1800–1870, at the European Library and the HathiTrust resulted in a number of additional publications from a wider variety of sources. Despite their usefulness, these larger digital repositories, which are not confined to music, seem not to be mentioned on the ViFa site.

ViFa's data set of ‘web resources’, which number over two thousand, describes itself as a ‘Collection of quality-controlled Online Resources for Musicology’. It encompasses web pages of international organizations, including the Institut de recherche sur le patrimoine musical en France (IRPMF); a variety of music schools, institutes, and societies devoted to a specific creative artist, such as the E.T.A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft; home pages for musicologists and composers, including Bruckner; and digitized copies of various publications, including an article by Jens Hesselager on Berlioz that appeared in the 2005 Musik & Forskning. Such a vast array of sources is somewhat bewildering; although one can read through an unordered list of all the sites, or electronically search the list, there is no clear, detailed explanation of the criteria used for selecting these sites. For instance, despite the numerous organizations included in this list, the Society for Music Theory and the home page of the International Musicological Society are not listed, though at least one of IMS's conferences and one of its interest groups are. By contrast, the AMS's homepage is listed. One of the useful aspects of this database is that it provides a capsule overview (usually in German) of each site, including the identity of its author and a hotlinked url. By using this database a researcher can locate information about current scholarly projects. For instance a search with the keywords ‘Schumann Gesamtausgabe’ led to the listing for the Robert Schumann Forschungsstelle. This incipit includes a hotlink to the Robert Schumann Forschungsstelle site (http://www.schumann-ga.de), which provides information concerning the new Schumann edition.Footnote ² Providing hot links to unaffiliated sites can be risky because the sites might be taken down or relocated. Nevertheless, despite the impressive number of listings on ViFaMusik, there are relatively few links that do not lead to the advertised site. One such problem was uncovered during a search of the ‘web resources’ for ‘music conferences’. This led to a description of the Golden Pages that gave a defunct url and listed John Rink, instead of J.P.E. Harper-Scott, as this project's administrator.

ViFaMusik accesses a huge repository of information, so searches on well-worn topics, such as the names of important composers, need to be narrowed. Under advanced search, one can search by title, author, year of publication, and data set. Once the results of the search appear on screen, one can further narrow the results by selecting from electronically produced lists of keywords, which are organized under the headings of subject, language, publication type, year, author and database. A search for Fauré publications from the years 2000–2013 resulted in over 440 hits, including scores, books, articles and recordings. Restricting the search to ‘lied’, one of the subject terms generated by the search engine, resulted in five books either devoted to Fauré's songs or including chapters on them (see Figure 1). Two of these catalogue entries provided copies of the table of contents.Footnote ³ However, the subject headings offered by the search engine are usually in German and English, and therefore the French terms romance and mélodie were not suggested (though there was a single hit for romances). In contrast, separate searches with Fauré and these two terms as keywords did yield a variety of results. As a general rule, it seems that selecting keywords to insert at the start of a search, rather than relying on the computer-generated subject headings, will result in a greater number of hits.

Fig. 1

Screenshot of ViFaMusik search for material concerning Fauré

ViFa does not appear to have search fields for audio or video recordings, and when the search engine retrieves such items, some are designated as such by a special icon, but others use the same icon as books. However, once a search has been carried out, audio recordings can be located by selecting ‘Tonträger’, which is located under ‘publication type’ in the electronically generated filters; in some cases, the ‘subject’ area will also offer the filters CD, DVD, or DVD-Video. It would seem that at this time, users looking for these types of materials might find more results at Europeana, (www.Europeana.eu), a site collecting digital resources from across Europe. Moreover, this site, in addition to some of those listed in ViFa's Digital Collections area, streams audio and video recordings. Given the recent interest in performance practices of the nineteenth century, this lacuna in ViFa is a little disappointing. For instance at the digital site of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr, one can hear a 1906 recording of Adelina Patti (1843–1919) performing “Ah ! non Credea mirarti” from Bellini's La Sonnambula. Incidentally, this site has excellent search options, and one wonders whether ViFaMusik might consider implementing a similar design. Even in the basic search option, one can choose from the following filters: books, manuscripts, maps, images, periodical, sound recordings and scores. Many of this site's resources, including the Patti recording, also may be accessed via the Europeana site.

Searches almost always produce interesting results, but the ViFa search engine does not always thoroughly troll each of the contributing services or listed ‘web resources’. For instance, separate searches for autographs of Schubert and Chopin, without selecting a specific database, located a small number of manuscripts in addition to various published editions and studies based on autographs. Far more manuscripts were listed on searches confined to the RISM database. But even then, it is worthwhile to use the hyperlink and go directly to the RISM site where RISM's own search engine may well produce slightly different results. The design of the ViFa site gives one the impression that ViFa's search engine automatically searches all of the sites linked to the homepage, but it would appear that this is not actually what happens. For instance, searching for information on the Heckel bassoon (or fagotto) did not result in any hits. However, a similar search at the Europeana portal resulted in a number of images, some of which were provided by the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) (http://www.mimo-international.com), a consortium of eleven European musical instrument museums. This site includes both sound and visual files for a huge range of instruments, including western and non-western instruments from various periods. Back at the ViFa site, a search of the ‘web recourses’ database using the acronym MIMO revealed a hotlink to the MIMO site – but the site itself seems not to have been accessed by the ViFa software in the initial search for Heckel bassoon.

Although the items under the heading Digital Library include Music Literature of the BSB, librettos, and an umbrella term Digital Collections, only the BSB resource is automatically searched. The ‘Libretti’ section houses digitized copies of libretti, some of which date to the start of the seventeenth century. These items are held by the BSB, the Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rome and the Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt, each of which has its own search engine. The Digital Collections area provides an impressive array of resources that likewise must be searched individually. These resources are organized according to the following categories: general collections, thematic collections, countries and regions, and people. Each list appears to be arranged alphabetically according to the name of the institution/project. However, this is not particularly intuitive. For instance, the National Library of Australia is listed under N; and the Bibliothèque Nationale is listed under G for Gallica – the name of the library's amazing digital collection. Moreover, the array of resources, like those in the ‘web resources’ area, is somewhat disconcerting, and no explanation for the inclusion or exclusion of sites is provided. This ‘Collection’ includes institutions, such as the University of Rochester's Sibley Music Library, as well as small collections and specialized projects such as the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM) and Das Rostocker Liederbuch. There is a slight overlap between this area of ViFa and the ‘web resources.’ For instance, the ‘web resources’ includes separate links to the Library of Congress's Performing Arts Encyclopedia and to many of the projects within its ‘American Memory’ collection, but these two resources can also be accessed via links in the Digital Collections. For the most part, however, these services complement each other: there is no entry under Chopin in the Digital Collections ‘people’ section, but an electronic search of the ‘web resources’ dataset provides hotlinks to a number of sites, including those dealing with Chopin editions, such as the Online Chopin Variorum Edition Project (http://www.ocve.org.uk/). In other cases, the Digital Collections area provides links to departments or projects within libraries, such as the ‘Musiktheorie und Musikwissentschaft (BSB)’ site, which do not appear to be available to ViFa's main search engine. (The ‘Musiktheorie und Musikwissentschaft (BSB)’ site provides digitized copies of music treatises from the BSB, which date from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, including theoretical tracts by such authors as Albrechtsberger and performance manuals such as those by Ferdinand David.) Unlike ViFa's ‘web resources’ section, the Digital Collections does not provide capsule descriptions of the various sites, and thus the user is obliged to inspect each site and work out its individual offerings, merits, and limitations.

A number of the sites listed under Digital Collections offer high quality digitized reproductions of important primary sources including music sketches, autographs of complete compositions, and composers’ letters. However, ViFa does not list the Library of Congress's Music Consortium Website (http://www.loc.gov/musictreasures), which gives online access to music manuscripts from major institutions in the United States and United Kingdom, including the Morgan Library in New York and the British Library, the BSB and the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn.

ViFaMusik has tremendous potential for scholars and students. The main part of the site, with its powerful search engine, will be of particular interest to investigators at the very beginning stages of a new research project, and to those of us wishing to catch up on the most recent publications on a given topic. Furthermore, ViFaMusik benefits independent scholars who are not affiliated with a library that provides free access to online music databases. For the most part, though, students at major US universities will probably use this site in conjunction with other databases and services, such as One Search, RILM and WorldCat, which deliver documents in fewer steps/clicks than ViFa. The Digital Collections area, despite the noted shortcomings, has the potential to be a major tool in locating high quality digitized copies of primary sources. With its constant updates and commitment to continued improvements, ViFaMusik will become a major tool in any bibliography or research methods course for music students as well as a favourite bookmark of many scholars.