Bibliotheca Rudolphina is an interdisciplinary project, which aim is to present in a comprehensive manner one of the most valuable music collections in Poland in the Seventeenth Century, which are characterized by an exceptional importance to European culture. The project involves the collection of information on the preserved library, digitization and making all of the preserved musical collections of George Rudolf's Liegnitz-Brieg library available as well as the possibility to search for the missing sounds in libraries all over the world. The end result will be a website: www.rudolphina.pl, where all digitized materials with metadata, the catalogue and descriptions, and the collection's history will be found. Transcriptions of songs that have not been made available to the public yet will also be made available.
A series of converts will be organized as part of the project, and unknown renaissance songs will be presented in a few hundred years. The recordings on 6 CDs will go to the most important audio collections in world libraries. The descriptions of Polish music sources from this collection will be included in an international directory RISM in Frankfurt.
Components of the Project:
- digitization of one of the largest collections of music from the Seventeenth Century Europe, which contains several thousand songs (currently 265 volumes: prints and manuscripts), partially stored in the National Library, Friends of Sciences Society Library in Liegnitz, the University Library in Wroclaw and the Library at the Catholic University in Lublin. The whole collection in Wroclaw (3000 sheets), Liegnitz (6500 sheets) and Warsaw (13400 sheets) will be scanned within the framework of the project. The collections in Lublin (3000 sheets) will be digitized and made available in 2014 as part of the project Lublin Virtual Library;
- Incomplete collections of „Bibliotheca Rudolphina” will be completed by the missing sounds thanks to an international musicologists' inquiry under the supervision of authorities that are eminent in their field (Prof. R. Pośpiech from the University of Wroclaw, A. Kolbuszewska from the University Library in Wroclaw, and Dr. J. Byczkowska – Staff of the National Library in Warsaw);
- transcriptions of selected works on contemporary musical notation (T. Dobrzański, P. Karpeta and musicologists from the University of Wroclaw)
- Placement of digitized resources, information about a collection and transcriptions made on the project's website;
- recording of 6 CDs of the historical treasures from „Bibliotheca Rudolphina” with a disbursement of 1000 copies: 3 Cantores Minores Wratislavienses CDs– a private choir from Wroclaw, founded by E. Kajdasz, that has been known for almost 50 years and led by Piotr Karpeta for 20 years, and 3 Ars Cantus CDs – one of the best Polish bands, specializing in early music, led by Thomas Dobrzański since 2000;
- A cycle of 18 concerts (2 series of 3 concerts of each band within the 3 year duration of the project) with multimedia presentations and lectures for students. Concerts will take place in cities, where collections of „Bibliotheca Rudolphina” are currently stored, i.e. Warsaw, Wroclaw and Liegnitz;
- sending pre-recorded CDs to selected libraries all over the world;
- locating the descriptions of Polish music sources from „Bibliotheca Rudolphina” in the international catalogue RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), where there are only 22 items, to date.
