What has been done with the material in more recent times?

Cataloguing

An enormous cataloguing project was carried out some years ago, so that every work in all 33 libraries is supposed to be listed in a central catalogue, one copy of which is in Stockholm (Academy of Music), and another in Kassel, Germany, where a multi-volume Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) is gradually being published. Copies of the published work - which does not yet include manuscripts - are held by larger libraries, and each of the libraries with musicalia has a copy of the entries for its own works. Åke Davidsson published catalogues of both music and books on music in Swedish libraries, listed at the end of this article.

Unfortunately, the catalogue lists the works only by composer's name, not by combinations of voices and/or instruments, nor periods, styles, types of piece etc.; and since known composers are in such a small minority, there is a serious limit to the catalogue's usefulness. Then again, in one library where I worked fairly intensively, I discovered that what was written on the outside of the work - on which the catalogue entry was based - was not an adequate description of what was inside: in some cases it was wrong ("Lendell" instead of "Hendell"), in others it was incomplete (in a work labelled as 'violin duets', the "second violin" part turned out to include parts for flute, cello and viola traposta). In this library, steps are being taken to puts things right, but one wonders what the situation is elsewhere.

[Update 2002] During the last ten years I have been working on a complete and practical catalogue of the 2000 works in the Härnösand collection; the paper version is complete, and I'm currently transferring it into computer form; the next stage will be to make it accessible via the www.