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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
