International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres

The founding conferences were held in Basel and Florence in 1949, in Lüneburg in 1950, and in Paris in 1951, the last one conducted by UNESCO.

[4] The Accademia Nazionale Luigi Cherubini celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1949, an event that brought around 60 music librarians, musicologists, and museum professionals from twelve countries to Florence.

[6] The war had caused heavy losses at many libraries, and international cooperation was of utmost importance.

The goals of the Florence conference included updating the status and locations of the musical sources described in Robert Eitner's Biographisch-Bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1900–1904), establishing a central office in each country responsible for microfilming musical sources from before 1800, and addressing issues related to music cataloging.

RIPM, founded in 1980, preserves, reconstructs, and makes available music periodicals originally published from ca.

By 2014, RIPM has indexed 215 music periodicals, published 306 printed volumes and a database of more than 726,000 annotated citations.