Navigating the RISM data with RISM Online

In 2021, the RISM Digital Center introduced RISM Online. This represented a shift in how we present the RISM data to a global audience, supporting new methods of digital research and keeping the RISM project central to modern music scholarship. RISM Online is designed from the ground-up to move past a simple descriptive catalogue, treating the results of over 70 years of indexing, collating, organizing, and curating musical source descriptions and authorities as a significant and valuable data resource in itself. In this paper we explore the shift from catalogue to dataset more closely, looking at some of the unique and valuable information captured by RISM that can be of use to data-driven musicology. On the way we will identify how RISM Online is making this data available through the tools and access points we have built. Finally, we will report on some ongoing experiments with the RISM data as we seek to exploit the relationships captured therein as an active area of future work.