Digital Catalogue of Anton Bruckner‘s Works

The project Digital Catalogue of Anton Bruckner‘s Works is designed to bring about a new and fully revised edition of the printed Werkverzeichnis Anton Bruckner (WAB), published in 1977. It will benefit from synergy with two projects already up and running – www.bruckner-online.at and Digital Anton Bruckner Lexicon – under the auspices of the Division of Musicology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Digital Anton Bruckner Lexicon amounts to a digital and fully revised new edition of the 1996 Anton Bruckner. Ein Handbuch. When published early in 2017, it will present extensive Bruckner scholarship in a total of over 1000 articles.

www.bruckner-online.at is now a comprehensive internet portal on Anton Bruckner, including not only electronically documented manuscript sources but also compositions, literature, and information on relevant persons and places. Complete digital versions of all manuscripts, first prints and the old Complete Works Edition are available. At present, 750 shelf-marks with critical commentaries have been recorded. 32,000 images of digitized manuscripts and 6,000 of prints are available. The website’s launch attracted significant media attention.

The current Bruckner archive system based on common databases will be transformed to XML-MEI data storage. The project aims to create a digital, multimedia Bruckner works catalogue in a format suitable for long-term conservation and platform-independent data exchange.

The XML data processing and storage modalities to be used, together with the vast information resources to be made available, ensure that the project will more than match up to modern standards. The www.bruckner-online.at web archive will be appreciably extended and will be the most comprehensive web presence for any composer worldwide.

The two-years project is financially supported by the Open Research Data funding program (ORD) of the FWF.