Hello, For two classes that I teach, I distribute dozens of mathematica notebooks as lecture material. I would like the students to be able to search through these notebooks for topics and examples. I'd like to construct a tool that is a hybrid between a search engine and an index.

I am hoping that I could get advice about how to proceed.

Ideas that come to mind: 1) Create a palette that opens all notebooks below a given top directory and uses front end functions such as NotebookFind[]. However, opening all notebooks seems like overkill.

2) Just create a PDF of all the notebooks and use a pdf search tool. However, this wouldn't link to the particular notebooks.

3) Extensively tag all of the cells in all of the notebooks; write some front end code to programmatically create a palette. The palette would be updated as the lectures grow. However, it is going to be a hassle to usefully tag all of the cells.