Having recently started playing with some music groups, I notice the range of freely-available scores in collections as Portable Document Files is extremely large.

Managing paper scores is not easy - they fall to the floor too easily for one thing!

Wondering how my particular though limited IT skills might help with this problem, I decided to have a go at making a composite index for some of these resources.

Exporting the index pages of 3 of these PDF collections as text and manipulating them a bit in a text editor, I was able to produce files that I could further manipulate using some simple programming in BASIC into comma-separated-value (CSV) files I could load into a spreadsheet.

The three collections I have started with are Finbarr's Tune Book, Paul Hardy's Session Tunebook 2020, and The Tuneworks Tunebook Second Edition. The combined score collection comprises 1 065 scores, though there is some duplication.

My intention was to make an alphabetical list of titles, their keys, the name of the source document, and the page number within that source. So far I have only produced the index without the keys as a feasibility study. Entering these key signatures will mean looking at each of the 1 065 scores and entering the key for each: Even the "duplicates", because the same titles may be versions in different keys!

I then "printed" the spreadsheet to PDF file, portable document format, to make it available for printing or viewing in a modern browser on 'phones or tablet computers.

The result so far is available to view here.

As the present file is rather large, I anticipate that it might be helpful to have separate files for each letter, automagically accessible from an A-Z index page. Or would it be better to have the A-Z links at the top of each letter section, or even each page? I may look into this next if I receive any encouragement.

There are doubtless many improvements that could be made. What, for instance, should I do about the "The"s. Should they consistently all be at the end after a comma?

For technical reasons (to make it easier for me!) I've changed any "No 1"s to "#1" etcetera. This is also internally more consistent.

Last updated Monday the 6th of November 2023