BSB Unveils a New Libretto Portal

At the IAML conference in Vienna this past summer, Franz Juergen Goetz of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich unveiled a new “Libretto Portal.” The site is a new search engine to access the scanned libretti from the Christian Her Collection (approximately 5,600 items) and also scanned libretti from the Deutschen historischen Instituts in Rome (about 1,500 items). The holdings of the combined collections date from the 17th through the 20th centuries. The new portal offers enhanced search capabilities over the previous access available through ViFaMusik.

Metadata for the corresponding libretti will be searchable in WorldCat, Europeana, and the HMT Library at Liepzig.

Goetz indicated that future plans include additional indexing of other digitized libretti collections and the possibility of full-text searching.