The archive of the International Gustav Mahler Society (IGMS) is among the world's most extensive and important collections of research and source material on the work of the composer and conductor Mahler.
Funding from the Digital Heritage program (Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport) enabled the implementation of a comprehensive digitization project (01/06/2023–31/08/2024) in collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Department of Musicology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the Gustav Mahler and Viennese Modernism Research Center of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), the Music Collection at the Austrian National Library, and Universal Edition (UE).
The digitized copies fully cataloged in the metadata during the project period include musical sources and event program books comprising 944 digital copies or 39,125 pages. All digital copies are searchable via the IGMS online catalog (https://www.gustav-mahler.org/archiv/suche) and most of them are accessible online. The digital copies released for open access are also included in the Kulturpool (https://kulturpool.at) and Europeana (https://www.europeana.eu) repositories. In addition, further digital copies amounting to almost 30,000 pages were created as part of the project, which are to be made accessible successively by the end of 2024.
All released digital copies are made available in the online catalog in the form of PDF/A files. Digital copies not released for open access can be used as PDF/A files in the IGMS archive for research purposes. All individual pages (tif or jpg files) and all digitized material as PDF/A files are also archived by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in the ARCHE repository (A Resource Centre for the HumanitiEs) (https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/). These files on the ÖAW servers fulfill the criteria for long-term archiving and can be accessed via context links, which will also appear in the IGMS online catalog in the future.