Hi all --  Claus Kucher told me about "The New Zealand Digital Library
MELody inDEX".  I have not taken a deeper look at it, but it has a
"MidiTheme collection" which sounds very much like a searchable index
of MIDI files.  Also, it has a collection of folk songs (in English, and
some in German) which is accessed by *singing* (or whistling) a tune!
It's now found at

http://nzdl2.cs.waikato.ac.nz/cgi-bin/gwmm?c=meldex&a=page&p=coltitle

Apparently the themes are indexed by a very simple scheme: just record
for each note whether it is higher, lower, or the same as the previous
note.  Thus, it is not even necessary to sing (or whistle) the tune
correctly!

I have no idea what the project's status is, nor whether its software
could be used in a ragtime index -- or, come to think of it, for an
"all music index"!

As a more modest input for Robbie's idea of a "ragtime MIDI library",
there (still) is a long list of ragtime MIDI files at
http://www.primeshop.com/midilist.htm , although nothing seems to have
happened on the site since around the end of 1998 (and it is, e.g.,
missing "Ragtime Jim", for which we searched for some time ago...).

Robbie also wrote, "If I was wise I would always carry with me the
thematic index from the German edition of Scott Joplin -- it's indexed
just like a Mozart or Schubert folio!"

Good thing: In the Edition Peters edition, they index the first theme,
_not_ the intro.  Not so good (but common): they index the first theme
*only*, so if you remember another theme, you're out of luck.  (I have
the same problem with Johann Strauss waltzes, which are often actually
a sequence of waltzes; finding them in my sheet music is not always
easy.)

Regards

Harald M. Mueller
Grafing bei Muenchen
Germany