IMSLP Forums

When you have orchestral parts listed for a large work, they take up a lot of page real estate. For example the "Parts" section of http://imslp.org/wiki/Das_Rheingold,_WW ... ,_Richard). I think it would be nice to have this template be collapsible so you can more easily scan the available scores.

Another case where this might be good is for recordings. The individual songs of a song cycle should be uploaded as separate files. For Schubert's cycles, this will take a lot of space at the top of the page, when most people are probably interested in the sheet music. Having this as a collapsible section will make the work page easier to navigate. I don't know of any examples of this at this time, but I see it as a likely scenario.

This is particularly needed for pages with multiple editions of full scores, vocal scores, parts, and arrangements.

The page for Mozart’s Requiem is utterly dire in this regard, since there are multiple sets of scores and parts (5x FS, 3x sets of parts, 5x VS, 5x arrangements, split into over 81 separate files!) – and that’s without there being recordings available, or original sources like manuscripts or first editions, which would be important from musicological points of view. The situation would only be worse, owing to the inconvenience of copyright law, if the page were obliged to share not just the traditional completion (by Süßmayr et al.), but several of the alternative completions, which now number over the dozen mark, and because of the default organisation of the library, might involve over a dozen more files per each separate completion.

The best option to me seems be a collapsible structure at the level of major headings that can be invoked by including a magic word somewhere in the page markup which switches the “collapsed view” on: pages without this magic keyword in the markup would display as normal.

For an example of how this might look, the normal works page has a structure like the following (with a huge amount of stuff omitted!): And there are usually other headings at finer levels of “indentation” (delimited by 4 or 5 equal signs). What would be nice would be a “magic word” immediately after *****FILES***** that specifies which headings are displayed (or hidden), such as so that only headings down to the #th level appear, with “disclosure” buttons displayed for each, and the files collapsed out of sight; the omission of # could be taken to assume that all (rather than none) of the headings are displayed; but all of the files are deemed to be hidden away by virtue of the “collapse”.

The number of files that are being hidden should be able to be easily counted (from the number of separate entries of {{#fte:imslpfile and the number of |File Name … variables within each) and displayed as part of the disclosure, e.g.
Full Scores
+ 3 downloadable files

The point at which a page should be switched to the collapsed mode is then up to some sort of common sense rule-of-thumb: I’m tending to think that once there are more than fifty files available for download, there’s an argument that this should be invoked, because the Work Info and Comments sections are effectively banished to the bottom of the page: a novice visitor to the site may not even know that those page elements are actually there, if they scroll through several pages of files, files, files, with seemingly no end in sight.

Cheers, PML