Why are book indexes so inconsistent? All the different variations create all kinds of questions. The short answer is that every index is a custom job. One of the first things new indexer mentees notice when I’ve asked them to evaluate an index from their own point of view is that there are so many variations […]
Indexing Names: Passing Mentions
All professions, whether they admit to it or not, develop specialized vocabularies—jargon, terms of art, whatever you want to call them—and indexers, to whom vocabularies are the bread and butter, are no exception. Last time on the blog, Joanne wrote about a couple of basic errors to look for when evaluating indexes. The first one she discussed […]
Evaluating an Index: Finding What Works
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 […]
