Reconstructing Complete Runs of Music Periodicals

In many cases RIPM is required to reconstruct complete runs of journals by bringing together missing or damaged pages, issues and volumes from many different libraries. Factors leading to the poor condition of music journals include not only fire, flooding, war, printing on paper that decays, and poor storage conditions but also, to damage by readers and rodents, the snipping of sections of journal pages to create subject files, the wholesale destruction of journals for lack of space or after microfilming, and the loss of journals sent to secure sites or misplaced within a library or storage facility. In many cases, a typical nineteenth-century journal which may have had a publication run of 1000 copies now only exists in a handful of libraries, of which all copies are frequently incomplete. 

Reconstructing complete run of journals often leads to the creation of the only complete copy in existence. However, the process required to achieve this goal is costly and very labor intensive, for it involves painstaking research, a massive amount of communications with libraries, obtaining the right to scan documents, and locating organizations to undertake the necessary scanning.