This reference work serves as a comprehensive bibliographic tool designed to locate specific musical compositions across a vast array of published song collections. Minnie E. Sears and Phyllis Crawford compiled this index to address the difficulty of identifying the location of individual songs within multi-volume anthologies. The text provides a structured, alphabetical access point for researchers, librarians, and musicians seeking to retrieve specific scores or lyrics from a wide range of historical and contemporary songbooks.

The work is regarded as a foundational bibliographic resource for music librarianship and historical music research. Its systematic approach to indexing provides a reliable, albeit specialized, utility for navigating early 20th-century musical archives.