What can main headings be composed of?
Main headings, which kick off an entry or array, usually describe a single person or thing. It could be a name, or a government agency, or a physical object, or a concept. It is concrete and identifiable. Which is what we want in a main heading. Readers need to be able to clearly identify what it is they are searching for.
But sometimes the thing that we are trying to describe is complicated, and it is okay for the main heading to expand and help carry the weight of the text.
I ended up taking this approach for the index for The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Modern East Asia, by Sheila Miyoshi Jager (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023). This is a delightful history, squarely within one of my favorite areas to index—East Asian studies—while also quite challenging in its scope and length, at about 570 indexable pages.
This book is about the colonial jockeying for power and control over Korea, with Korea ultimately becoming a protectorate of Japan. One of the challenging aspects was all of the intertwined relationships. Korea is a key player, of course. Japan is also involved, and wanting to be taken seriously as a great power. Russia also has its interests and influence. China is a waning influence, though still trying to exert itself. Though less involved, the other Western powers—US, Britain, Germany, France—all played a role as well. Much of the book covers the diplomatic back-and-forth as all these powers try to figure out what to do with Korea (instead of respecting Korea’s independence). From an indexing standpoint, what is the best way to index all of these relationships?
Most of these relationships, say between Korea and Japan, or Japan and Russia, are too large to be contained within a subheading or two. These are relationships that span decades, and include wars, lengthy negotiations, and shifts in the balance of power. With so much material to cover, double-posting these relationships under each respective country would have led to enormous, unwieldy arrays.
The solution I landed on was to make the relationship itself the main heading. So, “Korean-Chinese relations,” “Korean-Japanese relations,” “Japanese-Russian relations,” etc… I still had arrays for each country, for subheadings specific to that country, but the bulk of the entries fell under these various arrays for these relationships. This meant that under Korea or Japan, for example, there are several arrays, which break down the discussions into manageable, yet still clearly defined, portions.
This also raised the question of which country to prioritize in the main heading. Should it be “Japanese-Russian relations” or “Russian-Japanese relations”? Because Korea and Japan were the two biggest actors, I decided to let them take the lead, so to speak,, with the Western countries generally being listed second.
These main headings also required a lot of cross-references from the other countries. As I mentioned, double-posting wasn’t a viable option due to the sheer number of entries. Better to pick a single array to place entries under, and then use cross-references to point readers in the right direction. For example, “Russian-Korean relations. See Korean-Russian relations.”
If you are interested in seeing all this in action, you can view the index here, on Amazon, using the Look Inside feature.
The number one goal for main headings is that they be clear. A confused reader is less likely to find what they are looking for. But while keeping clarity in mind, you can also play with main headings to better match the discussions in the book. Some subjects and relationships are more complicated, and a longer, multi-part main heading may be the clearest and best option.