Tightening Up Biography Indexes

Tradition in indexes of biographical subjects has always been a bit counter-intuitive to us indexers. With other subjects, best practices call upon us to avoid long lists of subheadings under what we term “metatopics” (topics that cover the whole book or very large portions of it), and to make main headings out of most of the subtopics, because the index is a tool that’s mostly used to find more specific topics that may be scattered within the text. Kind of silly to have a 1000-page book on birds with a main heading of “birds” and hundreds of subheadings for each species or habitat, etc. Let’s just start with specific species and habitats as main headings and go from there.

Biographical subjects definitely fall under the metatopic category, but our indexing tradition treats them very differently. I think it’s largely just because they are people, and more information at their name gives them importance, and also because there’s a certain genealogical aspect to a biographical index (making sure there are main headings for all the person’s relatives, and subheadings under those for relatives with lots of mentions). We are supposed to get most of the book’s subtopics under the biographical subject’s name somehow, even though that may mean a long list of subtopics plus subsubtopics. And on top of that, most biographies have been published using the run-in/paragraph style for subheadings, so scanning the actual information for the subject is virtually impossible. We’ve used all caps subheadings for larger categories (CAREER, EDUCATION, FAMILY) to force subsubheadings in and avoid long strings of page numbers with no further information. But it’s really hard to use, this sort of index entry.

As I’ve added years to my book indexing career, I have begun to “cheat” on this biography rule, and I think my way still respects the importance of the main subject while making subtopics easier to search on. We indexers have always double-posted most of a biographical subject’s life subtopics separately as main headings with their own subheadings, but my philosophy has evolved to go ahead and send the indexer user to those main headings instead of also trying to fit them all under the subject’s name. I have allowed myself to add cross-references from that name to other main headings.

This way, I can reserve the biographical subject name’s subheadings for personal topics that don’t work as well as main headings that people would look up by themselves (like “character,” relationships with specific people, “marriage” or “health problems”—unless those topics turn out to be big ones). I can cross-reference to “political career,” “military service,” “See also specific works by name” for authors and artists, etc.

I’m sure other experienced indexers have employed these methods for reducing the number of subheadings and locators at the biographical subject’s name, but indexer beginners can be intimidated by the level of detail about a single person and not know how to approach that more efficiently.

So, I do rebel against the biography index tradition, and I think it’s better for index users and ultimately still quite respectful of the biographical subject.