I’ve tried searching for something on the Web using keywords or phrases and been given a list, which although it’s filtered through a “relevance” algorithm, still gives me mostly irrelevant content. Some folks say it’s just me being lazy with my search terms and that I should go to the advanced search options to narrow […]
Mirror, Mirror: Matching the Index to the Text
There are various metaphors for an index: a roadmap, web, a library catalog, a hallway full of doors. I even sometimes graph out an index, putting what I think of as “vertical topics” (chapters and main sections) on the y-axis and “horizontal topics” (the small incidental themes that pop up over and over throughout the book) […]
Setting Boundaries with Clients
After an interesting conversation with a PI partner on Skype, I looked back and saw a blog post on setting boundaries that needed expression. I remember from when I started my freelance book indexing business the feeling of not wanting to turn down any jobs, because, who knows if another one would show up to […]
Indexing Expertise: The Importance of Practice
Love reading nonfiction? Know quite a bit about a lot of subjects? Expert author in your field? It seems like these would be great preliminary qualifications for building indexes. And understanding of the subject matter is a very important prerequisite for indexing a book, although PhD-level expertise may not always be necessary. For example, I […]
Expert, Generalist, or Somewhere in Between?
One of the fun things about indexing — yes, it’s a fun job! — is learning about subjects I wouldn’t otherwise. In my spare time, I’d rather read a young adult novel than a book about party politics or programming apps. But on the job, I do read about just about every subject imaginable (indexers […]
Every-Name Indexes
In book indexing, we normally treat names and subjects similarly in terms of looking for significant mentions as opposed to automatically including all mentions of either category of terms. But if we do get a request from a client for every mention of a term, that request is normally focused on names. And not just […]
