[Lady Fitzgerald]

Ok, I'm back (actually I'm Jeannie...). You guys are thinking a lot like I am but on a parallel path. I have about a hundred songbooks (not including the two to three dozen hymnals). Like I'm doing with my book collection, I'm going to cut most of them apart (not the ones with some historical value; I have a few oldies) and scan them with my cute little ADF scanner (tiny but mighty). But, instead grouping the songs back into a single PDF per songbook (part of the scanning process), I can keep each song separate.

Instead of having to manually search through the table of contents of each songbook (frustrating, tedious, time consuming, and just plain boring), I was thinking of taking each song (most the books have one song on one or more full pages; I'll figure out how to deal with the ones that have more than one song per page later) and putting it into a library as though each one was a book. I can identify which songbook each "book" came from by listing the title of the songbook as a series (although I don't see any need to enter series numbers unless calibre has other ideas). This way, I can use calibre to create a list of the original songbook titles (I can use it to make sure I don't buy duplicates; I'm such a music whore) and I can search for individual songs, including duplicates (often, there are multiple lyrics, tunes, and arrangements), by title, composer, genre, ethnicity, meter, key, and whatever other tags I can think of to toss in there. If I can't think of a search term, I can always browse the list (now that would be a nightmare if still in separate songbooks).

Am I making sense and does anyone see anything wrong with this? In the meantime, I've had a rough day and I'm calling it a night (especially since it's dark out). I'll try setting up a second library tomorrow when, hopefully, my brain is working better and play with this.