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Update 2023-11-16-harald-heckmann-in-memoriam.md
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BaMikusi authored Nov 16, 2023
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Heckmann was presumably a founding member of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), founded in 1950 under the leadership of Vladimir Fedorov (1901–1979), and at that time usually abbreviated as AIBM after its French name Association Internationale des Bibliothèques Musicales. From 1959 to 1974 he served as Secretary General, then as President until 1977, eventually becoming Honorary President of the association. Even earlier he was involved with the founding of the international documentation projects operating under the auspices of IAML and often mentioned as the “R-Projects”: RILM, RISM, and RIdIM. (RIPM was only added later.)

He was particularly concerned with RISM, serving as its secretary from 1960 and as its president after 1988. Together with his friend, the Mozart scholar Wolfgang Rehm (1929–2017), he succeeded in setting up a second office under the name RISM Zentralredaktion, alongside the original RISM Sécretariat based in Paris. Initially, the new office in Kassel was responsible for the production of the A/I series, including individual prints before 1800. Only in the early 1980s did the Zentralredaktion also take over the A/II series, dedicated to music manuscripts from 1600 to 1800 (but later extended to 1850 and beyond). It was a milestone when, together with Wolfgang Rehm, Heckmann managed to secure funding for the latter project from the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. After his retirement in 2004, he also became honorary president of RISM.
He was particularly concerned with RISM, serving as its secretary from 1960 and as its president after 1988. Together with his friend, the Mozart scholar Wolfgang Rehm (1929–2017), he succeeded in setting up a second office under the name RISM Zentralredaktion, alongside the original RISM Sécretariat based in Paris. Initially, the new office in Kassel was responsible for the production of the A/I series, including individual prints before 1800. Only in the early 1980s did the Zentralredaktion also take over the A/II series, dedicated to music manuscripts from 1600 to 1800 (but later extended to 1850 and beyond). It was a milestone when, together with Wolfgang Rehm, Heckmann managed to secure funding for the latter project from the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. After his retirement in 2004, he became honorary president also of RISM.

A central theme of his work, both professional and voluntary, was the introduction of information technology into music documentation. He was one of those managers who were themselves not closely familiar with such tools (and how could they have been), but nonetheless recognized the vast perspectives they opened up, which we tend to take for granted today. It is thanks to him and his like-minded colleagues, above all Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), that the RISM A/II series came to be conceived in terms of computers from the very beginning, and that publication in book format was ruled out – even though at the time no one could have a clear idea about how the database might be published later.

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