Digitization and Online Catalogue of the Archive of the International Gustav Mahler Society

Project Directors
Christian Utz
Renate Stark-Voit

Research Assistants
Dimitrios Katharopoulos (01/09/2023–31/07/2024)
Julia Lenart (01/12/2023–31/08/2024)
Raphaela Quass (01/06–30/11/2023)
Annachiara Seitlinger (01/06–31/08/2023)

External Collaborators
Clara Maria Bauer (Gustav Mahler and Viennese Modernism Research Center, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)
Philipp Gaspari (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, project Multiple Dimensions in Performances of Mahler’s Symphonies)
Peter Provaznik (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Seta Štuhec (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Raffaela Utz

The board of the International Gustav Mahler Society (IGMS) has been preparing the digitization of the IGMS archive since 2019. Funding from the Digital Heritage program (Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport) enabled the implementation of a comprehensive digitization project 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 Archive of the of the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), the Music Collection at the Austrian National Library, and Universal Edition (UE).

The aim of the project was to digitally secure and publicly disseminate the IGMS’s archival holdings. Digitizing the archival holdings guarantees a contemporary preservation of the sources, including numerous original manuscripts, significant primary sources and unique items, and significantly improves accessibility. The holdings are not only relevant for scholars in the fields of music, politics, history, and culture, but also for a broader public interested in the history of Austria, the Habsburg monarchy, Viennese modernism, and the intertwining of music and politics from the late 19th century to the present. In addition, the digitization of the sources is also of great interest to active musicians, since the musical archive holdings also include conducting scores and orchestral parts with handwritten annotations.

Through the Mahler online project, which has been in preparation since 2019 with the first version going online in 2024, the IGMS, in cooperation with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Innsbruck, has designed and implemented a comprehensive online repository for Mahler’s work and its research, which provides an optimal context for the publication and digital archiving of many digitized IGMS holdings.

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 our web catalog 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 IGMS 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://id.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/gustavmahlerarchiv; https://hdl.handle.net/21.11115/0000-0013-BE8D-7). 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.