Announcing A New Online Musicological Resource: Hofmeister XIX
For the last three years the Hofmeister XIX project, based at Royal Holloway, University of London with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has been creating a web-based database of the Hofmeister _Monatsberichte_ for the period 1829-1900. The _Monatsberichte_ (monthly catalogues issued by Friedrich Hofmeister, Leipzig) are the most detailed source of information about nineteenth-century music publications, with particular emphasis on the German-speaking countries. They provide information about when a given composition was published, where, by who, and at what price; using Hofmeister XIX you can locate any item by searching on e.g. composer, title, publisher, place of publication, or date, and extract information such as what publishers were active where and when. Hofmeister XIX records are linked to the facsimiles of the _Monatsberichte_ on the Austrian National Library website.
Hofmeister XIX is now delivered in its beta version, meaning that further optimisation and correction is in process. In general the search interface should work well, but the browse and index interfaces can be slow; we hope to rectify this in Version 1.0, scheduled for autumn 2007. In the meantime you can help us by using the system and providing comments or corrections using the on-line forms. It will be particularly useful if you can do this between now and 20 August 2007, as our schedule allows for corrections during this period.
Hofmeister XIX is on open access at www.hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk