In the last decade, RILM has undergone quite a drastic change, expanding from being an Abstracting & Indexing provider to offering various full-text resources. RILM has also been at the forefront of developing technology after launching its platform Egret. With DEUMM Online having just joined the RILM suite of resources, RILM has also become a content provider. This very much aligns with my vision of tying RILM’s identity closer to music research and to the UNESCO network. I seek to strengthen RILM’s standing and reputation and help its trajectory in various areas of content development: licensing, committee work, author submission and engagement for RILM Abstracts, and the curation of new resources. In turn, RILM would capture and preserve a more comprehensive if not complete record of music writings as world cultural heritage. First and foremost, as my predecessors, I strongly believe in RILM’s mission. RILM will remain committed to documenting and disseminating the world’s knowledge about all musical traditions, and to making this knowledge accessible to research and performance communities worldwide via digital collections and advanced tools. RILM will continue to include the music scholarship of all countries, in all languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Since the beginning of my tenure, we have been bolstering this mission and the underlying idea of a global network. We have entered new partnerships with different organizations and institutions, an effort that is ongoing with several new networks underway. Our partnership with the National College of Arts in Lahore, for example, helped to include the publications of Pakistani scholars, who were previously underrepresented. Our partnership with the Institut du monde arabe in Paris has set RILM’s course for covering the Arab world. Our collaboration with the Central Conservatory in Beijing is our latest exciting venture. While these initiatives and RILM’s mission seem to be focused outward, it is important to recognize that, as already indicated previously, it can well inform matters of content development. It can shape RILM’s International Center and thus guide the internal development through visionary management. For example, it may support staff retention and recruitment. Just in June of 2024 , RILM was accredited as an NGO to provide advisory services to UNESCO’s Committee of Intangible Cultural Heritage and we honed our mission accordingly. Now it includes also safeguarding and preservation as an ongoing focused effort. An immediate and visible outcome of this is the imminent launch of the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines, which preserves distinct aspects of many nations’ popular culture that is often unavailable and easily lost. The possibilities with UNESCO are vast. We have already participated in the UNESCO World Conference on Culture and Arts Education 2024 with a virtual side event comprising four short presentations. Unlike many other UNESCO-accredited NGOs, RILM has been working globally in a UNESCO-style-like structure and we can bring much to the table but also learn a lot from UNESCO operations. For the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, we are prepared to offer our experience with our network of local knowledge communities that is national, supranational, and regional committees, an idea and a model that can be quite helpful for other NGOs in our shared goal to safeguard and preserve. In line with the objectives of the larger UNESCO program, I also seek to facilitate RILM’s expansion of networks and collaborations, helping establish new teaching initiatives related to music bibliography and, in line with the program, contributing to the enrichment of existing university programs while promoting cultural diversity. A closer alignment with UNESCO will hopefully help to mobilize a wide informal network of higher education institutions and similar institutions to undertake activities for protecting and safeguarding the cultural heritage of countries currently underrepresented in RILM’s resources. The value of RILM to the research community is directly proportional, by the way, to how thoroughly it represents music scholarship. The recent accreditation, for us, is a starting point of larger conversations that we seek in the coming years with the UNESCO and that will hopefully lead to new networks for RILM, as well as new engagement and new visibility. RILM’s biggest asset is its staff. Without our multilingual editorial team who together covers dozens of languages and is engaged in a broad spectrum of musical activities, the fulfillment of our quest would not be possible. Our New York office is a mini-UN, with musicologists and support staff from Austria, Brazil, China, Colombia, Croatia, France, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, Scotland, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the United States. I hope I haven't forgotten anybody. I am incredibly proud of our team and their engagement in music research. With no other music organization in the world currently having the capacity or wish to operate beyond disciplinary and other boundaries, my vision is to bring RILM ever more closely to a UNESCO-style existence and operation, representing and serving as a hub for music researchers worldwide regardless of their subject area, their place of work, or the language and scope of their work, to represent and disseminate their work, past and present. Given RILM’s strong and clearly formulated mission, this seems nothing new. And yet with international societies in our music studies arena failing to reach beyond the musicology/ethnomusicology divide, amongst other divides, and with ongoing neglect of scholars working under conditions that do not allow them to participate in dialogues that these societies seek to facilitate. Scholars from Albania to Zaire are left out of ongoing conversations, unheard, unrecognized, and thus remain at the fringes of established and existing “peripheries.” I strongly believe that RILM as an organization has the power to identify and include them into a truly global conversation. Related to this is the issue of bibliography, the most important foundation for all researchers, and specifically music researchers working in the field of music studies, inside and outside the academy. In recent years, with the rise of Google and especially Wikipedia as substitute dictionaries for practically any question, the importance of authoritative information has never been more urgent. And yet the recognition of this urgency has lagged. Over twenty-five years ago already, Brian Robinson - who has by the way previously worked at RILM too - in his study, “Anything goes?”, has already shown that bibliographic quality control of music theses and dissertations is largely inadequate; but there has been no turnaround since. As the harbinger of music literature, RILM can make a difference here and help with good practices in music studies. RILM’s resources can impact how canons are established, changed, perceived, and disseminated. RILM seeks to do this by disseminating expertise in bibliography as an expertise available to all. Simply put, RILM is made by music researchers, for music researchers, as music researchers. Our resources are used by anybody researching music from around the world. The rapid development of automation or AI seems to divert from established resources, but recent technological advances will also lead to questions: what’s real and factual and reliable? RILM’s model and RILM’s staff safeguard authority and truth—yes, while using tech—in ways that will be absolutely essential in the years to come. As generative AI will surely improve, the social sciences will become more and more important because we have to figure out what should be done once anything can be done. Since its inception, RILM's international scope has been made possible by its collaborative-style structure modeled on the United Nations’ concept of “member states” that in the operation of RILM have translated into national, supraregional and regional committees, which are responsible for submissions of citations and abstracts for our flagship resource RILM Abstracts specifically. Other notions that the United Nations have put forward—the recognition of certain countries and languages,the identification of developing countries—have likewise filtered into the working rationales at RILM’s International Center, more granularly into the approach to indexing in RILM Abstracts and overarchingly into the organization’s mission. This model is not just a lesson, but it has really shaped my thinking as a scholar, as a writer, and as a teacher. Without RILM, I can truly say I wouldn’t be where I am today within the academy, in the world of publishing, and also as the fifth person to lead RILM. Part of the experience of being at RILM is also the understanding that in our industry, we talk a lot about data and databases. Yes, it is so important to remind ourselves that we also deal with knowledge and this knowledge is produced by people. RILM could not do what it does without its knowledgeable staff and the extensive network of knowledgeable people we have built over so many decades who support a mission, ever more important in our changing and quite divided world.