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The core skills for an indexer...

What are the core skills required by an indexer?

First, an indexer must be a skilled reader, a reader who can quickly and easily identify the essential content of a book and the interrelationships between the ideas and concepts presented by the author.

Second, an indexer must be able to pick out the topic sentence of a paragraph and the key ideas and relationships presented in sections of the text. These are the places where the most important information can be found.

The skilled indexer understands that not every term, every name, or even every concept should be included in an index. Indexes should lead people to substantive information.

What is substantive information? This is a difficult but critical concept to understand. And if you squeeze the definition too hard, the idea escapes. It’s like trying to compact a ball of cooked rice. If you’re careful when you’re shaping the rice, you get a nice round ball. If you squeeze the rice, however, it oozes out between your fingers, and you end up with a mess.

The substantive information concept cannot be understood in terms of hard and fast rules.

Instead, substantive information might best be described in terms of user expectations. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. If you go to the page given in the index, will you find meaningful information, or just a passing reference? Meaningful information might be a good definition of substance. Or, you might consider it in the light of whether or not you would want to be directed to a particular section of text. Was the reward from finding this section of text worth the effort to locate it?

If you are thinking that the substantive information concept is a matter of judgment, you’re right. It is a matter of judgment on the part of the indexer. But it is also a matter of understanding the reader and the goals of most readers of a book.

Third, a good indexer will have strong information search skills. If you have the ability to quickly find the information you want on the Internet or in a library catalog, then you already have good information search skills. You need only apply those skills to the information search tool you are writing. In a sense, this is a reversal of the procedure you currently apply to finding information. An indexer must make decisions about the terms that the book’s users will most likely use to search for information.

Indexing: Page 2
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