Book Indexes: Too Much or to Little?

In a recent post we discussed the problem of “passing mentions” related to names in indexes and the strings of “undifferentiated locators” that may result. This problem applies to any topic covered in the index, though, not just names. When you put the two together (passing mentions and lots of page numbers) you have the frustration of not finding useful information after spending time going to all those different pages. This defeats the purpose of an index.

Providing more detailed information, two ways

There is another time when long strings of pages at a single entry can be frustrating: that’s when there really is information there, but you can’t tell if it is relevant to what you want to know.

One of the goals of an index is to provide efficient access to information within the text. Let’s assume that we are not dealing with “passing mentions,” here but rather the case of “an overabundance of locators” where real information is to be found.

Suppose that what you really want to know about agriculture in Louisiana is rice production. With just a main heading a lots of locators, you’re going to have to go to each page to find out what aspect of agriculture is discussed, and you won’t know if rice is even considered. So this entry is not very useful:

How much more useful it would be had you been presented with the information below:

In the best of all possible worlds, if you went to the index knowing that you wanted information about rice production, cotton production or sugar plantations, you would not have to look up agriculture at all. In addition to having the agriculture access point, you would also find those specific categories directly, as in “cotton production” or “sugar plantations” as their own main heading in the c or s sections of the index.

The power of more specific main headings, as well as well-though-out subheadings is quite visible here. For index usability, we indexers have to be thinking about multiple access points for all reasonable levels of detail in a text.

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*Examples from Best Practices for Indexing, American Society for Indexing, 2015.