Albert R. Rice, founding and contributing editor of WIM-db, holds a PhD from Claremont Graduate University. He is a clarinetist, author, appraiser of musical instruments, review editor for the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society and the AMIS Newsletter and past president of the society. A retired librarian and musical instrument curator, he has written four books on the history and repertory of the clarinet (all published by Oxford University Press), a catalog of the Marlowe A. Sigal Musical Instrument Collection (2015), thirty-two book reviews, and contributions to the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2014) and the Lexikon der Holzblasinstrumente (2018). He was awarded Galpin Society’s Anthony Baines Prize of 1999; the American Musical Instruments Society’s Bessaraboff Prize for 2011 for the most distinguished book-length work in English, and the Curt Sachs Award for 2011, honoring lifetime devotion to scholarship related to musical instruments. Contact Dr. Rice.

John Watson was the architect of the online edition of WIM-db and migrated its initial content from the 1993 print edition of The New Langwill Index.  He continues to help with technical support and webmaster. He is emeritus conservator and curator of musical instruments at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. His research on keyboard instrument history and conservation has resulted in numerous articles, three books, and 34 reproduction keyboard instruments. He received the 2024 Frances Densmore Prize from the AMIS for his article on the earliest surviving piano made in America, the 2020 Curt Sachs Award, the highest honor given by AMIS for lifetime contributions to the goals of the society, and in 2024, the Galpin Society’s Anthony Baines award. He serves as general editor of Boalch-Mould Online, an interactive database of harpsichords and clavichords and their makers. Contact John Watson.

The Musical Instrument Research Catalog (MIRCat) is a not-for-profit organization that supports selected free online digital archives and databases serving researchers, collectors, makers, and caretakers of historical musical instruments and fosters the continual growth and improvement of those resources. It receives funding from individuals and allied institutions, including the American Musical Instrument Society. Members of the MIRCat Board of Directors serve without compensation and include at the time of the WIM launch (in alphabetical order): Heike Fricke, Darcy Kuronen, Albert Rice, Gabriele Rossi-Rognoni, Thomas Strange, Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, John Watson, Michele Winter, and Matthew Zeller.
MIRCat relies on the an unpaid team of passionate organology professionals, and on paid help from independent database and web application developer David Marrero. Other paid data-entry assistance has come from Dr. Robert Apple.

• The Wind Instrument Makers Database (WIM-db) builds upon a century of scholarly work beginning with Lindesay Langwill of Edinburgh. Langwill received inspiration from direct contact with seminal organologists Canon Galpin and Curt Sachs. Over his life, he compiled large quantities of information from dozens of similarly motivated scholars including especially collector Dayton C. Miller and other collectors, museum professionals, and researchers around the world. Langwill's work was taken up by William Waterhouse who greatly expanded the scope and detail of the information, and published two editions of Langwill’s Index, culminating in the 1993 edition of The New Langwill Index: A Dictionary of Musical Wind Instrument Makers and Inventors, which formed the core of the WIM-db.
• Anthony Bingham, London publisher and dealer of historic musical instruments was responsible for publishing the 1993 print edition, and seeing to it remaining in print over the subsequent three decades. Without his publication of the Index, the work of generations of scholars may never have made it into the digital realm.