The Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) is an international project sponsored by the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation centres (IAML), the International Musicological Society (IMS), and the International Committee of Musical Instrument Museum Collections of the International Council of Museums. RIdIM was officially founded on 26 August 1971, during the meeting of IAML in St. Gall (Switzerland) on the initiative of Barry S. Brook, Geneviève Thibault Comtesse de Chambure, Harald Heckmann, Howard Meyer Brown and Walter Salmen. As the international index of visual sources of music, RIdIM has pursued dual aims since its establishment: it is charged with the cataloguing of visual sources of musical subject matter, and functions as a framework for their interpretation. Thus, the main objective of RIdIM is the development of method, means and research centres for the classification, cataloguing and study of iconographical sources related to music. It is designed to assist performers, historians, librarians, instrument makers, record manufacturers and book publishers in making the fullest use of visual materials for scholarly and practical purposes.

The cataloguing of iconographic documents significant to music was, until the early 1970s, largely a private and uncoordinated affair, poorly equipped with methodology and research tools. Several systems of cataloguing visual materials had been proposed, but RIdIM took the lead in this area. RIdIM thus followed RISM (1952) and RILM (1966) as the third important international cooperative bibliographical venture in music. RIdIM centres have been established in Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Several archives, museums, and other institutions have published inventories and catalogues with iconographic sources of musical subject matter. From 1973 to 1980 annual RIdIM meetings have been held at the Research Centre for Music Iconography at The City University New York (CUNY). This tradition continued with the international conferences in Paris in 1985, in Hamburg in 1991, in New York in 2003 and 2008 and in Salvador de Bahia in 2011. The 14th International RIdIM Conference will take place in Istanbul in 2013. A special conference website is under development.