Information Universe Indexing Technologies

Types of indexes and indexing.

These common indexes are often found in the back of reference or technical books or as an access tool for a journal or newsletter. A well-written index can decrease the time to find specific information. Stand-alone indexes can be created in 30 to 40% less time than embedded indexes. Any minor changes to the pagination can be handled readily using dedicated indexing software. Dedicated indexing software packages such as Cindex or Macrex provide many functions that facilitate the indexing process. For example, dedicated indexing software will flag blind or circular cross-references ("See" and "See also"). Stand-alone indexes can be created for print-based documents as well as some hypertext documents. Use a stand-alone index when you:

Need an index fast.

Anticipate making substantial revisions to the next release of a document.

Need to keep current costs to a minimum.

What is embedded indexing?

Embedded indexing is done in several different formats including MS Word, Pagemaker, Framemaker and other word processing and desktop publishing software. This is when the indexing is inserted in the document itself as hidden field tags that are compiled into an index when the tagging is all done. Use an embedded index when:

Adjusting the layout or formatting of a document

Making minor updates or additions to a document

Creating an index for an online or hypertext document

The flexibility of embedded indexes comes with a price, however. A document filled with embedded index markers can be tricky to edit without disturbing or inadvertently deleting some of the index markers. For example, if you move a paragraph with an end-of-range index marker to a new location in the document, you can easily corrupt that index entry - and the error may or may not be visibly apparent.

Two-step Indexing Process

Professional indexers will often create a stand-alone index first and then embed the index markers. This two-step process takes advantage of the many special functions provided by dedicated indexing software. The total time required can be about the same or at times a little more than for embedding the index markers directly. You can continue to make minor revisions to the original document files while the stand-alone index is being written. In some cases, you can publish the document immediately using the stand-alone index and then embed the index markers afterwards.

Hypertext indexes designed for the Internet are essentially a traditional index going interactive with hyperlinks to the text. The process is similar to embedded indexing in that you are inserting tags as access pointers in the text for use as links from the index. You can see a sample of this type of index when you go to the site index page on many web sites. These can be used for web sites, e-journals, and archives. They also serve well as a navigation aid for your web site visitors. XML is a newcomer to this area. A few publishers and some companies are using it to create indexes and documents for single source document publishing into different formats.

There are also publications available on the Web in Acrobat .pdf format and postscript formats. We can work with these through the Acrobat authoring software. If you are working with Acrobat files the best way of creating an index is to insert a stand-alone index and use a linker to automatically link the page numbers to the text. As for Acrobat’s Catalog function it seldom provides an index that allows for quickly finding relevant entries. A full text index will pull up every occurrence of each word in the document. It slows down the search for relevant material.

Help files in software applications

Often you will find indexes to software application help files within the application itself. Just check out MS Word’s help menu. You will find an index to all the topics included in the help files belonging to that application. There are several types of Help authoring software including RoboHelp, HTMLHelp and others that include indexing of the files that they produce. I can’t comment much on the details of this type of indexing and software as I have not used it but I do want you to know about it regardless of my inexperience in it.

Online user guides and manuals

Software documentation is increasingly being delivered on the same CD-ROM disk that the software is on or is included on a separate disk. Indexing these files would depend on the format of the files (pdf, HTML, Word etc.). The choice of the indexing method would depend on the format of the file, though Acrobat pdf files seem to predominate due to its cross-platform capability.

A metadata search engine differs from other types of search engines in the way it searches web pages. Instead of a full-text search it can search meta tags for index terms that describe each page. This process decreases the time to find relevant material. It also increases the relevancy of the material and reduces the number of irrelevant hits. This technique can be used for file archives stored on either CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, an intranet or an internet web site. It is often also used for developing digital libraries on commercial, university or governmental web sites or web portals. Because of the quantity of information involved, most of this type of work would be done by specially trained teams who have experience in this type of work. One exception is when such a project starts small and it is designed to be scaled up gradually.

The best place to find indexers would be online at the American Society of Indexers (ASI) Indexer Locator. You can search this with a variety of requirements including subject, location, software formats, etc.. ASI also has a Jobs hotline for posting to list subscribers. You can find ASI at www.asindexing.org then click the "Find an indexer" link.

You may want to make a list of indexers that you find as any one of them may be too busy to handle your job.

Contact your list and see who is available. The indexers will have questions regarding your work. Have this information available – subject, number of pages to be indexed, deadline, book format, index format, type of index required, and your contact information. Have some concept of what you can afford to pay the indexer for the proposed work. Traditional indexing is usually charge by the page while embedded and online indexing may be charged by the hour. At this point you can negotiate a final contract with the indexer. As this is an abbreviated version you can find more information at the ASI web site and Dan Connolly’s article listed below.

ASI - www.asindexing.org

STC Indexing SIG www.stcsig.org/idx/index.html

Articles, books and web sites

Indexing from A to Z by Hans H. Wellisch 2^nd Edition

www.wrightinformation.com See articles page

www.informationuniverse.com (My web site)

Connolly’s "Hiring an Indexer" article at www.wfwbooks.com/howto.htm