Writing an index is usually a solitary activity, but when working in-house for Harbour Publishing I had the opportunity, to 2011, to lead a small team of indexers.
The book was The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver, a coffee table book clocking in at nearly 600 pages. Chuck Davis, the renowned local Vancouver historian, had been unable to finish the project before he died, and Harbour took on the challenge of pulling together a large team–over forty people–to finish the work.
By the time I was assigned to the index, two other people had already been hired to create a word list of all of the terms to be included in the index. My job, and that of my co-indexers, was to search the PDF proofs for those terms and fill in the page numbers. Normally I wouldn’t suggest this approach because there is a lot, such as concepts and references, that the search function doesn’t pick up, but in this case, as the book consists of short bits of trivia and sidebars, it worked alright.
As the lead indexer, I assigned chunks of this word list to my fellow indexers (there were three of us at this point), and we set about searching for these terms. The final Word document containing the index was over a hundred pages long. As completed sections came in, I would assign a new section and check the work that I had received for consistency and accuracy. When all of the terms had been searched, I proofread the entire index, checking spelling, alphabetization, and the correct ordering of locators, as we weren’t using dedicated indexing software which automates the formatting.
If I had the chance to do this again, I would make sure that we all had dedicated software. Creating the index in Word isn’t as slow, I assume, as using actual index cards, but it is still a lot of extra work. Instead of making a word list, I would have also discussed with my co-indexers, prior to starting, our strategy for what to index and how, and then divided the book by chapter among us. As sections came in I would have still checked for accuracy and consistency, but then let the software handle the formatting when adding these sections to the master copy.
Still, having such a hands-on approach to writing an index was an excellent opportunity to be grounded in the small details that ultimately make an index work. It was a great apprenticeship, and I’m proud of the work. It was also neat to contribute some of the captions, sidebars, and text as well.