The first page of the index of Novus Atlas Sinensis by Martino Martini, an altas of China published in 1655
An index (pl.: usually indexes, more rarely indices) is a list of words or phrases ('headings') and associated pointers ('locators') to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document or collection of documents. Examples are an index in the back matter of a book and an index that serves as a library catalog. An index differs from a word index, or concordance, in focusing on the subject of the text rather than the exact words in a text, and it differs from a table of contents because the index is ordered by subject, regardless of whether it is early or late in the book, while the listed items in a table of contents is placed in the same order as the book.[1]
In a traditional back-of-the-book index, the headings will include names of people, places, events, and concepts selected as being relevant and of interest to a possible reader of the book. The indexer performing the selection may be the author, the editor, or a professional indexer working as a third party. The pointers are typically page numbers, paragraph numbers or section numbers.
In a library catalog the words are authors, titles, subject headings, etc., and the pointers are call numbers. Internet search engines (such as Google) and full-text searching help provide access to information but are not as selective as an index, as they provide non-relevant links, and may miss relevant information if it is not phrased in exactly the way they expect.[2]
Perhaps the most advanced investigation of problems related to book indexes is made in the development of topic maps, which started as a way of representing the knowledge structures inherent in traditional back-of-the-book indexes. The concept embodied by book indexes lent its name to database indexes, which similarly provide an abridged way to look up information in a larger collection, albeit one for computer use rather than human use.
Earliest examples in English
In the English language, indexes have been referred to as early as 1593, as can be seen from lines in Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander of that year:
Therefore, even as an index to a book So to his mind was young Leander's look.
And in such indexes, although small pricks To their subsequent volumes, there is seen The baby figure of the giant mass Of things to come at large.
Table of contents of My Secret Life, showing lengthy chapter titles
But according to G. Norman Knight, "at that period, as often as not, by an 'index to a book' was meant what we should now call a table of contents."[3] Until about the end of the nineteenth century, books, fiction as well as non-fiction, sometimes had very detailed chapter titles, which could be several sentences long.
Among the first indexes – in the modern sense – to a book in the English language was Leonard Mascall's [4] "A booke of the arte and maner how to plant and graffe all sortes of trees" printed in 1575. Another was one in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, in Sir Thomas North's 1595 translation.[3] A section entitled "An Alphabetical Table of the most material contents of the whole book" may be found in Henry Scobell's Acts and Ordinances of Parliament of 1658. This section comes after "An index of the general titles comprised in the ensuing Table".[3] Both of these indexes predate the index to Alexander Cruden's Concordance (1737), which is erroneously held to be the earliest index found in an English book.[3]
Etymology and plural
The word is derived from Latin, in which index means "one who points out", an "indication", or a "forefinger".
In Latin, the plural form of the word is indices. In English, the plural "indices" is commonly used in mathematical and computing contexts, and sometimes in bibliographical contexts – for example, in the 17-volume Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (1999–2002).[5] However, this form is now seen as an archaism by many writers and commentators, who prefer the anglicised plural "indexes". "Indexes" is widely used in the publishing industry; in the International Standard ISO 999, Information and documentation – Guidelines for the content, organization and presentation of indexes; and is preferred by the Oxford Style Manual.[6]The Chicago Manual of Style allows both forms.[7]
"But the real importance of this passage is that it establishes for all time the correct literary plural; we can leave the Latin form "indices" to the mathematicians (and similarly "appendices" to the anatomists)."[3]
Indexing process
Conventional indexing
The indexer reads through the text, identifying indexable concepts (those for which the text provides useful information and which will be of relevance for the text's readership). The indexer creates index headings to represent those concepts, which are phrased such that they can be found when in alphabetical order (so, for example, one would write 'indexing process' rather than 'how to create an index'). These headings and their associated locators (indicators to position in the text) are entered into specialist indexing software which handles the formatting of the index and facilitates the editing phase. The index is then edited to impose consistency throughout the index.
Indexers must analyze the text to enable presentation of concepts and ideas in the index that may not be named within the text. The index is intended to help the reader, researcher, or information professional, rather than the author, find information, so the professional indexer must act as a liaison between the text and its ultimate user.
In the United States, according to tradition, the index for a non-fiction book is the responsibility of the author, but most authors do not actually do it. Most indexing is done by freelancers hired by authors, publishers or an independent business which manages the production of a book,[8] publishers or book packagers. Some publishers and database companies employ indexers.
Before indexing software existed, indexes were created using slips of paper or, later, index cards. After hundreds of such slips or cards were filled out (as the indexer worked through the pages of the book proofs), they could then be shuffled by hand into alphabetical order, at which point they served as manuscript to be typeset into the printed index.
Software is available to aid the indexer in building a book index.[9][10] There are several dedicated indexing software programs available to assist with the special sorting and copying needs involved in index preparation.
Embedded indexing
Embedded indexing involves including the index headings in the midst of the text itself, but surrounded by codes so that they are not normally displayed. A usable index is then generated automatically from the embedded text using the position of the embedded headings to determine the locators. Thus, when the pagination is changed the index can be regenerated with the new locators.
LaTeX documents support embedded indexes primarily through the MakeIndex package. Several widely used XMLDTDs, including DocBook and TEI, have elements that allow index creation directly in the XML files. Most word processing software, such as StarWriter/OpenOffice.org Writer, Microsoft Word, and WordPerfect, as well as some desktop publishing software (for example, FrameMaker and InDesign), as well as other tools (for example, MadCap Software's Flare), have some facility for embedded indexing as well. TExtract and IndexExploit support embedded indexing of Microsoft Word documents.[9]
An embedded index requires more time to create than a conventional static index; however, an embedded index can save time in the long run when the material is updated or repaginated. This is because, with a static index, if even a few pages change, the entire index must be revised or recreated while, with an embedded index, only the pages that changed need updating or indexing.
Purpose
Indexes are also designed to help the reader find information quickly and easily. A complete and truly useful index is not simply a list of the words and phrases used in a publication (which is properly called a concordance), but an organized map of its contents, including cross-references, grouping of like concepts, and other useful intellectual analysis.
Sample back-of-the-book index excerpt:
sage, 41–42. See also Herbs ← directing the reader to related terms
Scarlet Sages. SeeSalvia coccinea ← redirecting the reader to term used in the text
shade plants ← grouping term (may not appear in the text; may be generated by indexer)
hosta, 93 ← subentries
myrtle, 46
Solomon's
sunflower, 47 ← regular entry
In books, indexes are usually placed near the end (this is commonly known as "BoB" or back-of-book indexing). They complement the table of contents by enabling access to information by specific subject, whereas contents listings enable access through broad divisions of the text arranged in the order they occur. It has been remarked that, while "[a]t first glance the driest part of the book, on closer inspection the index may provide both interest and amusement from time to time."[11]
Ensuring each topic/section includes a variety of relevant index entries; use two or three entries per topic
Understanding the audience and understand what kind of index entries they're likely to look for
Use the same form throughout (singular vs. plural, capitalisation, etc.), using standard indexing conventions
Indexing pitfalls:
Significant topics with no index entries at all
Indexing 'mere mentions': "But John Major was no Winston Churchill..." indexed under 'Churchill, Winston'
Circular cross-references: 'Felidae. See Cats'; 'Cats. See Felidae'
References to discussions of a single topic scattered among several main headings: 'Cats, 50–62'; 'Felidae, 175–183'
Inconsistently indexing similar topics
Confusing similar names: Henry V of England, Henri V of France
Incorrect alphabetization: 'α-Linolenic acid' under 'A' instead of 'L'
Inappropriate inversions: 'processors, word' for 'word processors'
Inappropriate subheadings: 'processors: food, 213–6; word, 33–7'
Computer indexing from section headings: e.g. 'Getting to know your printer' under 'G'
Indexer roles
Some indexers specialize in specific formats, such as scholarly books, microforms, web indexing (the application of a back-of-book-style index to a website or intranet), search engine indexing, database indexing (the application of a pre-defined controlled vocabulary such as MeSH to articles for inclusion in a database), and periodical indexing[13] (indexing of newspapers, journals, magazines).
Some indexers with expertise in controlled vocabularies also work as taxonomists and ontologists.
Some indexers specialize in particular subject areas, such as anthropology, business, computers, economics, education, government documents, history, law, mathematics, medicine, psychology, and technology. An indexer can be found for any subject.
References in popular culture
In "The Library of Babel", a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, there is an index of indexes that catalogues all of the books in the library, which contains all possible books.
Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle includes a character who is a professional indexer and believes that "indexing [is] a thing that only the most amateurish author [undertakes] to do for his own book." She claims to be able to read an author's character through the index he created for his own history text, and warns the narrator, an author, "Never index your own book."
Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire includes a parody of an index, reflecting the insanity of the narrator.
Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves contains an exhaustive 41 page index of words in the novel, including even large listings for inconsequential words such as the, and, and in.
J. G. Ballard's "The Index" is a short story told through the form of an index to an "unpublished and perhaps suppressed" autobiography.[14]
Standards
ISO 999:1996 Guidelines for the Content, Organization, and Presentation of Indexes (this is also the national standard in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand)
Societies
The American Society for Indexing, Inc. (ASI) is a national association founded in 1968 to promote excellence in indexing and increase awareness of the value of well-designed indexes. ASI serves indexers, librarians, abstractors, editors, publishers, database producers, data searchers, product developers, technical writers, academic professionals, researchers and readers, and others concerned with indexing. It is the only professional organization in the United States devoted solely to the advancement of indexing, abstracting and related methods of information retrieval.
Other similar societies include:
Association of Southern African Indexers and Bibliographers (ASAIB)[15]
A reference work is a non-fiction work, such as a paper, book or periodical, to which one can refer for information. The information is intended to be found quickly when needed. Such works are usually referred to for particular pieces of information, rather than read beginning to end. The writing style used in these works is informative; the authors avoid use of the first person, and emphasize facts.
Key Word In Context (KWIC) is the most common format for concordance lines. The term KWIC was first coined by Hans Peter Luhn. The system was based on a concept called keyword in titles which was first proposed for Manchester libraries in 1864 by Andrea Crestadoro.
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks. InDesign can also publish content suitable for tablet devices in conjunction with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Graphic designers and production artists are the principal users.
Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author ; the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects".
This page is a glossary of library and information science.
Stop words are the words in a stop list which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text) because they are insignificant. There is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, nor any agreed upon rules for identifying stop words, and indeed not all tools even use such a list. Therefore, any group of words can be chosen as the stop words for a given purpose. The "general trend in [information retrieval] systems over time has been from standard use of quite large stop lists to very small stop lists to no stop list whatsoever".
The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, generally known as Strong's Concordance, is a Bible concordance, an index of every word in the King James Version (KJV), constructed under the direction of James Strong. Strong first published his Concordance in 1890, while professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary.
In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts represented in databases.
Document classification or document categorization is a problem in Donald Trump's world that he fixes by releasing them.
Microsoft WinHelp is a proprietary format for online help files that can be displayed by the Microsoft Help browser winhelp.exe or winhlp32.exe. The file format is based on Rich Text Format (RTF). It remained a popular Help platform from Windows 3.0 through Windows XP. WinHelp was removed in Windows Vista purportedly to discourage software developers from using the obsolete format and encourage use of newer help formats. Support for WinHelp files would eventually be removed entirely in Windows 10.
Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, preferred terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, listing every instance of each word with its immediate context. Historically, concordances have been compiled only for works of special importance, such as the Vedas, Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, James Joyce or classical Latin and Greek authors, because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era.
In information retrieval, an index term is a term that captures the essence of the topic of a document. Index terms make up a controlled vocabulary for use in bibliographic records. They are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize and disseminate documents. They are used as keywords to retrieve documents in an information system, for instance, a catalog or a search engine. A popular form of keywords on the web are tags, which are directly visible and can be assigned by non-experts. Index terms can consist of a word, phrase, or alphanumerical term. They are created by analyzing the document either manually with subject indexing or automatically with automatic indexing or more sophisticated methods of keyword extraction. Index terms can either come from a controlled vocabulary or be freely assigned.
Concept mining is an activity that results in the extraction of concepts from artifacts. Solutions to the task typically involve aspects of artificial intelligence and statistics, such as data mining and text mining. Because artifacts are typically a loosely structured sequence of words and other symbols, the problem is nontrivial, but it can provide powerful insights into the meaning, provenance and similarity of documents.
Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, and computer science. An alternate name for the process, in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet, is web indexing.
The following is a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.
Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it is about identifying and describing the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents within a field of knowledge.
Text annotation is the practice and the result of adding a note or gloss to a text, which may include highlights or underlining, comments, footnotes, tags, and links. Text annotations can include notes written for a reader's private purposes, as well as shared annotations written for the purposes of collaborative writing and editing, commentary, or social reading and sharing. In some fields, text annotation is comparable to metadata insofar as it is added post hoc and provides information about a text without fundamentally altering that original text. Text annotations are sometimes referred to as marginalia, though some reserve this term specifically for hand-written notes made in the margins of books or manuscripts. Annotations have been found to be useful and help to develop knowledge of English literature.
Indexing software consists of computer applications that help to build an index.
Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age is a 2022 book by Dennis Duncan that examines the history of indexes. Indexes, argues Duncan—paraphrasing Jonathan Swift's Mechanical Operation of the Spirit—allow the reader a legitimate means of starting a book from the back, a practice he compares to "travellers entering a palace through the privy".
Booth, Pat (2001) Indexing: The Manual of Good Practice (K. G. Saur), ISBN3-598-11536-9
Borko, Harold & Bernier, Charles L. (1978) Indexing Concepts and Methods, ISBN0-12-118660-1
Browne, Glenda and Jermey, Jon (2007), The Indexing Companion (Cambridge University Press), ISBN978-0-521-68988-5
Diodato, V. (1994). User preferences for features in back of book indexes. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 45(7), 529–536.
Diodato, V. & Gandt, G. (1991). Back of book indexes and the characteristics of author and nonauthor indexing: Report of an exploratory study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5), 341–350.
Enser, P. G. B. (1985). Automatic classification of book material represented by back-of-the-book index. Journal of Documentation. 41(3), 135–155.
Fugmann, R. (2006). Das Buchregister Methodische Grundlagen und praktische Anwendung. Frankfurt am Main: DGI. (DGI Schrift; Informationswissenschaft – 10).
Grosch, A. N. (1986). Index-aid: Computer assisted back-of-the-book indexing. Electronic Library. 4(5), 278–280.
Hornyak, B. (2002). Indexing Specialties: Psychology. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Kendrick, P. & Zafran, E. L. (Eds.). (2001). Indexing Specialties: Law. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Mulvany, Nancy (2005) Indexing Books, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press) ISBN0-226-55276-4
Schütze, H. (1998). The Hypertext Concordance: A Better Back-of-the-Book Index. I: Proceedings of Computerm ´98 (Montreal, Canada, 1998). D. Bourigault, C. Jacquemin, and M.-C. L´Homme, Eds., pp.101–104.
Smith, Sherry & Kells, Kari (2005) Inside Indexing: the Decision-Making Process (Northwest Indexing Press), ISBN0-9771035-0-1
Stauber, Do Mi (2004) Facing the Text: Content and Structure in Book Indexing (Cedar Row Press) ISBN0-9748345-0-5
Towery, M. (Ed.). (1998). Indexing Specialties: History. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
Wellisch, Hans (1995) Indexing from A to Z, 2nd ed. (H. W. Wilson) ISBN0-8242-0807-2
Wellisch, Hans, H. (1986). "The Oldest Printed Indexes." The Indexer vol 15 no 2 October., pp.1–10.
Witty, F. J. (1965). Early indexing techniques. Library Quarterly 35, 141–148.
Witty, F. J. (1973). Beginnings of indexing and abstracting: some notes towards a history of indexing and abstracting in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Indexer : Journal of the Society of Indexers., 8, 193–198.
Wu, Z. etc. (2013). Can Back-of-the-Book Indexes be Automatically Created? In Proceedings of CIKM 2013. San Francisco, CA, USA.
Wyman, L. P. (Ed.). (1999). Indexing Specialities: Medicine. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.
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