International Bibliography of Discographies: A Worldwide Collaborative Project

To access the Bibliography, click here

Bibliography: the literature of a subject
Discography: a systematic catalogue of published sound recordings focused on a given performer, composer, record label, musical genre or country

History

Efforts to compile bibliographies which focus specifically on published discographies can be traced back to an article by Carl Bruun and John Gray from the Journal of the British Institute of Recorded Sound in 1962. During the next 20 years several other significant print bibliographies appeared, culminating in the publication of the Bibliography of Discographies series from 1977-1983 (vol. 1: Classical Music, 1925-1975 by Michael Gray and Gerald D. Gibson; vol. 2: Jazz by Daniel Allen; and vol. 3: Popular Music by Michael Gray). Michael Gray later provided an update of classical music discographies for the years 1976-1988, and Tim Brooks has included new discographies in the “Current Bibliography” section of the ARSC Journal for many years.

Timeline

In 2015, aiming to update this previous research and bring the data online, the IASA Discography Committee began working on the International Bibliography of Discographies (IBD) project. For two years the committee reached out to entities that would have an interest in this kind of resource - peer associations, institutions, collectors and discographers. We especially sought to connect institutions and private collectors, and to involve anyone who had studied and worked closely with the recorded output of specific labels, genres, artists, regions or countries.

In 2017 we published the first iteration of the IBD on the IASA website. It was compiled by Peter Laurence, Filip Sir, and a team of two students on behalf of the IASA Discography Committee. Since then many contributions have been made by individual collectors and discographers, as well as colleagues from peer associations and memory institutions. Thank you!

In April 2020, we published a new version of the IBD database, and we integrated the submission form into that resource. Entries can now be added here: https://ibd.iasa-web.org/form/

Scope

We intend the IBD to be a truly international survey of discographic work done to date, from all countries and in all languages. We collect information about all current and out-of-print discographies published worldwide in print and electronic formats, including unpublished work in progress.

As part of the project, we have also created an archive of complete digital (pdf) versions of discographies and record catalogues. This archive exists as a sub-collection at the Internet Archive known as the Digital Discography Collection. Entries in the Bibliography will include links to full digital versions in this collection, when they are available. If you would like to contribute a PDF version of your article- or book-length discography to the Bibliography and have it added to our collection on the Internet Archive, please use the following link (up to 2 GB): https://wetransfer.com/?to=filip_sir@nm.cz

In addition, we have compiled an Excel spreadsheet of historical print periodicals that are known to have contained discography articles. To access this document, use this link: https://goo.gl/VcfW9t

If you know of a discography periodical from your own country that is not listed here, please feel free to add it with as much detail as you can. Or you can send the title to Peter Laurence at peterlaurence27@gmail.com

This list can also be used as a starting point to track down discography articles in various publications. If you like, you can add articles to the IBD yourself (follow database link at the top of this page to find the submission form), or email us with the details.

Thank you for helping us build the International Bibliography of Discographies!

Contacts
Filip Sir
National Museum
Karmelitská 2/4
118 00 Prague 1
Czech Republic
Phone: +420 605 47 34 83
e-mail: filip_sir@nm.cz

Peter Laurence
Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
e-mail: laurenc@fas.harvard.edu