WIMA continues the defunct GMD Music Archive and is named after its founder, the late Werner Icking.
After a merge completed in 2012, the archive forms part of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).
Icking's original archive at the GMD (Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung) in Germany was the oldest online collaborative distribution site for music scores.
Renamed as the Werner Icking Music Archive in honour of its founder, the site was transferred to the Department of Computer Science (DAIMI) at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
The mathematician and computer scientist Werner Icking (25 June 1943–8 February 2001) spent a large part of his career at the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, a national research centre for applied mathematics and computer science in Sankt Augustin, Germany.