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I apologize if I have the wrong forum, I looked through the others and none seemed appropriate (except maybe General Discussions---Off Topic).

I am very interested in the 19th century French pianist and composer, Henri Bertini. Pascal Beyls has gone around to the obvious libraries (BnF, Conservatoire de Paris, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique etc) and listed their possessions in his book. There are likely other extant copies, but it is difficult to see how to locate them. I would like to try using the IMSLP to do this. Here is how it would work:

The Hector Berlioz page has a link to another IMSLP page, List of works by Hector Berlioz. I would like to have a similar page for Henri Bertini which would contain a list of Bertini's works (basically copied from the Wikipedia article, either as a list or a table) but which would also indicate the locations of known extant copies. Everyone would then be invited to add details of any copies which they are aware of, either in other libraries or their possession.

Would this be possible? Is is within the scope and philosophy of the IMSLP?

James Bailey wrote: There are likely other extant copies, but it is difficult to see how to locate them.

I dream of a catalog encompassing the catalogs of all music libraries in the world. Here are two partial catalogs I know: http://www.worldcat.org/ and
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/ but their selection rules of libraries are obscure to me. Hope this helps

With the
Karlsruhe Virtual Cataloge
http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk.html

you can worldwide search in libraries

James Bailey wrote: I am very interested in the 19th century French pianist and composer, Henri Bertini. Pascal Beyls has gone around to the obvious libraries (BnF, Conservatoire de Paris, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique etc) and listed their possessions in his book. There are likely other extant copies, but it is difficult to see how to locate them. I would like to try using the IMSLP to do this.

Would this be possible? Is is within the scope and philosophy of the IMSLP?

It's hard to imagine being able to muster the tens of thousands of man-hours required to compile such a thing. RISM has been an ongoing project for over 60 years, and only goes up to 1800, and still has deficiencies. IMSLP is lucky just get rough categories on every page.

RISM may only go up to 1800, but RISM online has material from very early until the 21st century, near as I can tell- in a very scattershot fashion, maybe (not entirely...), but ...

(at least, I have found works by modern composers - chamber music, for instance - when searching opac.rism.info... and from the 19th century they list a good number of autograph/copy ms by Brahms, Schumann and less-known composers. Thing is, i always thought RISM online was a subset of RISM proper; so now I am confused, and mistaken )