Before its creation, sound recordings on the 78 rpm format were typically uncataloged and difficult to locate, as it was unclear where assets were held—although some collections were organized by label name, matrix number, etc.

These meetings led to the publication of an initial planning study by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections that was conducted in 1978[6] along with Yale University's preliminary bibliography of journals that would be used in the project, also from 1978.

[8] Funding was made easier by the fact that the University of Maryland had received a Ford Foundation grant and had successfully completed a project for its International Piano Archives, where they used an automated system to create microfilm and an index of its holdings.

He had reached out to David Hall at what was then called New York Public Library's Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives, had learned of AAA's efforts, and agreed to provide matching funds for the Rigler Deutsch Index.

[14] The Rigler Deutsch Index is organized in six groups:[15] The Archive Siglum is the library that holds the recording: Efforts to digitize this resource as an asset available online were not initially successful.

Pointers to full documentation of the project as well as guides to the source data, to database and bibliographic products, and to methods for searching these resources are preserved in the Stanford Digital Repository and are freely accessible here[17] under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.