Will AI replace indexers? I think a lot of indexers have that question lingering in the back of their minds, similar to professionals in many industries. The standard answer against artificial intelligence is that indexing is complex and nuanced enough that only a human, with good reasoning and judgment, can… Read More »Hello AI, Goodbye Indexers?
I think every indexer will, at some point, experience a baptism by fire from updating a previously written index. It is tedious. It is time-consuming. It is mental gymnastics trying to get into the mind of the original indexer and trying to figure out what has changed. My first freelance… Read More »Updating an Index: Worth It or Not Worth It?
I want to shift focus this week to a thought experiment. Fiction is rarely indexed—I have never been asked so far. Yet as an avid reader of fiction, I have often thought about the potential advantages and what the challenges might be. I have blogged before about indexes for fictional… Read More »Indexing Fiction: Thoughts and Suggestions
Specificity is one of the elements we need to strive for in an index. We are, after all, as indexers, in the business of directing people to information, and to do so accurately and efficiently entries needs to be specific enough for the reader to quickly grasp. But this can… Read More »Writing Index Entries with Appropriate Specificity
A few months ago I wrote about using triage to shorten an index to fit a tight space limitation. Today, I want to approach the same problem from the other side, which is to proactively index in such a way that triage and cutting are not needed. Because while cutting the index… Read More »Indexing within a Space Constraint
I recently received the longest list of terms from an author that I have ever received. The list was so long that I immediately contacted the publisher and explained that even with the extra space I had already asked for and received for the index, there was no way that… Read More »Dealing with Authors and Their Lists of Terms
Indexing is so often about following the rules, but today I want to write about breaking the rules. Specifically, the alphabetical sort that is often the basis for organizing entries. Force-sorting is when an entry is deliberated taken out of alphabetical order and placed elsewhere in the index. This can… Read More »Do’s and Don’ts for Index Force Sorting
Words matter in the index. This may be stating the obvious, but I think it is worth repeating. The terms and phrasing used need to be readily understood by the user of the index. The text, of course, is the first place to look for terminology that can be transposed… Read More »Translating the Text for the Index
Last week I tried to puzzle my way through the concept of editing the index while the entries are being created, as opposed to saving most of the editing for the end of the indexing process. As I wrote, some indexers say that they save a lot of time by… Read More »Editing the Index on the Go Redux
With our income as indexers often proportional to the amount of work we can complete, efficiency is key. I want to consider today a practice that I know some indexers use, which is editing as the index entries are created. In theory—and I have heard some indexers say they manage… Read More »Editing the Index on the Go