Repertorium Celebrates Milestone: Digitisation of the Solesmes Archive Completed!

Repertorium is excited to announce the completion of an integral phase of our project: the digitisation of the Solesmes archive!

3 min readJul 24, 2024

One of our archivists, Dominique Crochu, gave this account of the process:

“ A few months ago, in March 2024, I asked Dominique Gatté to come with me to Solesmes for my tenth and final visit, to help me make an inventory of the microfilms stored at the Abbey. It is his speciality to find things that apparently can’t be found. As the microfilms were acquired later, only those stored in the notebooks you can see at the top of this photo were easily accessible. The rest were brilliantly collated by Dominique in the boxes below.

We then had to sort the microfilms of the manuscripts already online, and to set aside those that were not ready to be published, and those that had disappeared (destroyed, lost or stolen manuscripts). Of the 508 microfilms identified, 314 have been digitised. We took 15,394 images in 17 days. To achieve this feat, we had to create a system of rails between which we slid the microfilms. This avoided the need for a microfilm scanner, which is much slower and incompatible with the different types of microfilm processed. We only have a few weeks’ work left to process these images so that they can be used on the DIAMM website.

To complete this work, Dominique and I are working remotely on the server, via an encrypted VPN tunnel, where the images are stored. The server also hosts two virtual computers, which alleviates the processing problems associated with the enormous size of the files. It will be a race against time to meet the deadline of 31 August, but we are determined to manage it! “

Thanks to the untiring commitment of our archivists, we are celebrating the completion in two weeks of the whole collection of microfilms of Solesmes, which involved processing some 15,000 high-resolution raw format files. Congratulations to Dominique Crochu and Dominique Gatté from Association Musicologie Médiévale (MMMO)!