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 […]
Embedded and Hyperlinked Indexes
The embedded index The embedded index is an index where the entries have been inserted into the content of the book. Embedded indexes have been around for decades, but they’ve been quite clunky until just a few years ago. With tags marking the entries, publishing software such as InDesign or word processing programs like Microsoft […]
The Power of Affiliation
I still remember my first ASI (American Society for Indexing) conference in 1992 (long time ago). I was pregnant with my second child at the time, and the conference happened to occur in nearby San Antonio, Texas. This conference and the affiliations I was able to create by being there are what launched my book […]
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 […]
