I find that an index evaluation exercise is a great way to remind myself and any new indexers I’m mentoring about how important our indexing principles and best practices are to the reader or browser’s experience of a book or other document. It’s actually quite easy to identify some of the worst offenders in index construction. […]
Term Selection for Indexes: Mechanics vs. Semantics
When I’m teaching or mentoring prospective indexers, I focus primarily on term selection. Term selection involves the uniquely important indexing task of making decisions about what actually goes in the index. Unlike a search engine, we indexers don’t just put every mention of every term in the index. Being able to discern what is important, […]
Scripture and Ancient Sources Indexing
We at PI have spent the past several years collecting information on Scripture and ancient religious sources to serve our religious book publishing clients. We noted first that there wasn’t a single resource that covered all the possibilities, from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writings to Buddhist and Hindu writings. Our Sources We began our research […]
Generating Page Numbers for an Index
While I was working on a guest post over at Julie Karen’s book design site recently (she’s awesome, BTW), she asked me the following question: Once you have compiled your list of search terms manually, do you have a software that at least generates the page numbers for you automatically using your list? I think […]
Marketing Your Indexing Services
I often have new indexers ask me about marketing their services as they start out. The market has changed considerably since the 1990s when I was a newbie indexer. An entire publishing revolution has been happening since then. Crazy stuff with traditional publishers consolidating and outsourcing various production services to places like India, more packagers […]
Dead Indexes
I’ll never give up real, paper books (hardcopy) but I love ebooks, too, although I have a serious pet peeve about ebooks: indexes that are “dead.” A book without any index is sad, but a book with an unusable index is no only frustrating but not just plain painful. A lot of time and thought […]
