The first large-scale survey of printed music in UK libraries was The British Union-Catalogue of Early Music Printed Before the Year 1801. A Record of the Holdings of over One Hundred Libraries Throughout the British Isles, edited by Edith B. Schnapper (1957). Much of the data from this catalogue was later included in the printed RISM catalogues, and is now available in the international RISM Catalog of Musical Sources and RISM Online.
An initial project to document 17th- and 18th-century music manuscripts in UK libraries took place in the 1960s. Information was recorded in a card catalogue and supplemented with further data, on paper slips, in the 1980s.
In 1984, the RISM (UK) Trust was founded to oversee identification of printed and manuscript musical sources in UK libraries and archives.
Between 2001 and 2007 the RISM (UK) Trust was a project partner in the UK Music Manuscripts (1600-1800) Project, with the British Library and Royal Holloway, University of London. This project, funded via the AHRC’s Resource Enhancement Scheme, involved the keying of the data from the existing catalogue cards and slips, the enhancement of these records with musical incipits, and the cataloguing of anonymous works, which had not been included in the earlier projects. All of the data from this project is now searchable in the international RISM Catalog of Musical Sources and RISM Online.
In 2011, Royal Holloway and the British Library undertook Early Music Online, a project to digitise and create detailed catalogue records for 326 anthologies printed in the 16th century. The catalogue records, between them listing over 12,000 works, are not currently available via the RISM platforms, but can be found in the Royal Holloway Digital Repository, along with digital images of the material.
In 2020 Royal Holloway supplied Strategic Knowledge Exchange funds to replace the RISM UK database with a bespoke portal allowing searching of the international RISM catalogue for items held in UK libraries. These funds also supported a scoping study exploring possible areas for future projects. The study explored the online catalogues of over 60 county record offices and local archives in the UK, identifying over 600 items of printed and manuscript music between c.1500 and c.1850 that have not yet been catalogued in RISM, plus many other items that may contain musical notation and would need on-site investigation.
Documentation of pre-1850 music manuscripts and printed music in the UK is by no means complete, and the RISM (UK) Trust continues to develop plans for future projects in collaboration with universities, libraries and archives.