Index (publishing)

For other uses of "Index", see Index.

This article is part of the series on: Book design

General page layout and typography choices Front and back covers Endpapers Front matter Front cover Half title or Bastard title Frontispiece Title page Edition notice Table of contents List of figures List of tables Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Dedication Prologue Body matter, which may include: Parts Chapters Back matter Epilogue Extro/Outro Afterword Conclusion Postscript Appendix/Addendum Glossary Bibliography Index Colophon

An index is a list of words and associated pointers to where those words can be found in a document. In a traditional back-of-the-book index, the words or phrases are selected by an indexer and the pointers are page numbers or other pointers such as paragraph or section numbers. In a library catalog the words are authors, titles, subject headings, etc., and the pointers are call numbers. Internet search engines, such as Google, are electronic indexes.

Purpose

Indexes are designed to help the reader find information quickly and easily. A complete and truly useful index is not simply a list of the words and phrases used in a publication (which is properly called a concordance), but an organized map of its contents, including cross-references, grouping of like concepts, and other useful intellectual analysis.

Sample back-of-the-book index excerpt:

sage, 41-42. See also Herbs ← directing the reader to related terms

Scarlet Sages. See Salvia coccinea ← redirecting the reader to term used in the text

shade plants ← grouping term (may not appear in the text; may be generated by indexer)

hosta, 93 ← subentries

myrtle, 46

Solomon's seal, 14

sunflower, 47 ← regular entry

In books, indexes are usually placed near the end (this is commonly known as "BoB" or back-of-book indexing). They complement the table of contents by enabling access to information by specific subject, whereas contents listings enable access through broad divisions of the text arranged in the order they occur.

Elements of Indexing

Subject indexing involves two steps.

1. Conceptual analysis
2. Translation

To maintain a consistency of indexing, a set of indexing rules and guidelines can be established prior to indexing.

Conceptual analysis

An indexer first analyzes what a document is about. An indexer identifies the range and scope of coverage, perspectives, types of research, disciplinary areas, and other specific information the document provides. The level of indexing specificity and other details of indexing are determined primarily by user group needs. If a user group is a specialist in a certain field, indexer needs to tailor index to their specific needs.

Translation

After a conceptual analysis, an indexer translates his or her conceptual analysis to index terms. Conversion of conceptual analysis into index terms is called translation. There are basically two methods of translation: Derivative Indexing and Assignment Indexing. These two methods are distinguished by a difference concerning how and where index terms are obtained.

• Derivative Indexing

An indexer find terms or phrases used in the document and extract them as index terms. An indexer often extracts words or phrases from the title, abstract, and a table of contents.

• Assignment Indexing

For this type of indexing, an indexer selects index terms not from the documents but from controlled vocabularies which are a set of preselected, predefined terms. Those index terms may or may not appear in any part of the document. A collection of controlled vocabularies is called thesaurus in information science.

Indexing process in practice

The Traditional Process

The indexing process usually begins with a reading of the text, during which indexable (significant) concepts are identified and the terms to be used to represent those concepts are selected and sometimes marked (e.g. with a highlighter), or more likely, entered into a professional indexing software program. The indexer may make a second pass through the text during which he or she enters the terms into an index document, creating subentries where appropriate. Professional indexing software handles such tasks as formatting the index and arranging the entries into alphabetical order. The final task involves editing to improve consistency, accuracy, and usefulness, and to ensure it follows publisher's guidelines.

Indexers must analyze the text to enable presentation of concepts and ideas in the index that may not be named within the text. The index is meant to help the reader, researcher, or information professional, not the author, find information, so the professional indexer must act as a liaison between the text and the its ultimate user.

Indexing is often done by freelancers hired by publishers or book packagers. Some publishers and database companies employ indexers.

Contemporary indexing

There are several dedicated, indexing software programs available to assist with the special sorting and copying needs involved in index preparation. The most widely known include Cindex, Macrex, and SkyIndex.

Increasing interest in the use of electronic documents has led to the development of embedded indexing, where index terms are inserted into appropriate places in one or more source documents using some kind of markup language. An accurate, sorted list of these marked index terms ("index entries") can then be generated dynamically from the source document(s) at any time. This is a standard, yet little known, feature of many popular word processing programs such as Microsoft Word, StarWriter/Openoffice.org Writer, and WordPerfect. With sufficient effort, these can become true indexes, rather than concordances (as discussed above). They eliminate of the drugery, but are certainly no substitute for good indexing skills, and are not as flexible as special-purpose indexing software.

Index quality

Everyone has experienced a bad index; it's almost worse than no index at all. Some principles of good indexing include:

• Ensure each of your topics/sections includes a variety of relevant index entries; use two or three entries per topic
• Analyse your audience and understand what kind of index entries they're likely to look for
• Use the same form throughout (singular vs. plural, capitalisation, etc), preferably using standard indexing conventions
• One grouping approach uses nouns as the first level entries with verbs as the second level

Indexing pitfalls:

• Topics with no index entries at all
• Duplicate entries under different names (ie. "word processors" and "processors, word"). This is a problem only if entries are inconsistent, e.g., contain different locators. However, the process of double-posting entries under one or more terms can help users find the information, since they may very well use a term different from that used in the text.
• Inconsistently indexing similar topics

Indexer roles

Some indexers specialize in specific formats such as scholarly books, microforms, web indexing (the application of a back-of-book-style index to a website or intranet), search engine indexing, database indexing (the application of a pre-defined controlled vocabulary such as MeSH to articles for inclusion in a database), periodical indexing (indexing of newspapers, journals, magazines).

With their expertise in controlled vocabularies, some indexers also works as taxonomists and ontologists.

Some indexers specialize in particular subject areas, such as anthropology, business, computers, economics, education, government documents, history, law, mathematics, medicine, psychology, and technology.

References in Popular Culture

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle includes a character who is a professional indexer and believes that "indexing [is] a thing that only the most amateurish author [undertakes] to do for his own book." She claims to be able to read an author's character through the index he created for his own history text, and warns the narrator, an author, "Never index your own book."

Standards

• ISO 999:1996 Guidelines for the Content, Organization, and Presentation of Indexes (this is also the national standard in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand)

Societies

• Indexing Society of Canada
• American Society for Indexing
• Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers
• British Society of Indexers
• China Society of Indexers

Further reading

• Booth, Pat 2001, Indexing: the manual of good practice (K.G. Saur), ISBN 3-598-11536-9
• Browne, Glenda and Jon Jermey 2007, The Indexing Companion (Cambridge University Press), ISBN 978-0-52168-988-5
• Mulvany, Nancy 2005, Indexing Books, Second Edition (University of Chicago Press) ISBN 0-226-55276-4
• Smith, Sherry and Kari Kells 2005, "Inside Indexing: the Decision-Making Process" (Northwest Indexing Press), ISBN 0-9771035-01
• Stauber, Do Mi 2004, "Facing the Text: Content and Structure in Book Indexing" (Cedar Row Press) ISBN 0-9748345-0-5
• Wellisch, Hans 1995, "Indexing from A to Z", Second Edition (HW Wilson) ISBN 0-8242-0807-2
• Lancaster, F. Wilfrid. Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice. Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 1991.

External links

• The Indexer (the international journal)
• Consideration in Indexing Online Documents
• Complexity In Indexing Systems
• Usability studies for indexes
• Reflections on Authorship and Indexing
• "The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries", Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.
• The role of indexing in technical communication
• Indexing FAQ/Intro
• Author-created indexes
  • Author-Created Indexes
  • Should Authors Index Their Own Books?

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