Do I Need an Index?
Printed books come in all shapes, sizes, and formats and can not only serve different readers, but different purposes. The primary questions an author must ask regarding indexes include
Who is the audience?
How will they use my book?
The biggest question, which has been the subject of debate for quite some time is simple:
Do I need an index?
Indexes are commonly found is scholarly works and textbooks, as well as biographies and autobiographies. They can be very useful if the manuscript includes a lot of names of people and places. If an author mentions someone in a late chapter of the book, the reader may want to check where that name was first mentioned; an index provides a quick way to find it.
The debate has come up due to the advent of searchable text as it applies to electronic versions of books. While it’s true that searchable text can be an effective starting point, the search result will only be as good as the query that’s input by the user.
The Chicago Manual of Style discusses this as shown below. (As always, the end of quoted material is marked by this symbol: ∎.)
From the Chicago Manual of Style, section 16.2:
Why Index?: In this age of searchable text, the need for an index made with human input is sometimes questioned. But a good index can do what a plain search cannot: it gathers all the substantive terms and subjects of the work, sorts them alphabetically, provides cross-references to and from related terms, and includes specific page numbers or other locators or, for electronic formats, direct links to the text. This painstaking intellectual labor serves readers of any longer work, whether it is searchable or not. For searchable texts, an index provides insurance against fruitless queries and unintended results. In a word, a good index makes the text more accessible. ∎
Note the references to “human input” and “painstaking intellectual labor.” While for several years there have been various indexing tools that make the job a bit easier, creating an index is clearing not a “DYI” undertaking: In the majority of cases it falls into the category of “Don’t try this at home.” The Chicago Manual of Style discusses this aspect.
From the Chicago Manual of Style, section 16.5:
The role of software in indexing: A concordance—or a complete list of terms (typically minus articles, prepositions, and other irrelevant elements) and their page locations or frequency of use—can be produced automatically. But a concordance is not the same as an index. ∎
This last point is key: Not every term is worthy of being indexed. And while it’s true that the author is the most qualified to a certain extent to know what’s most important, a qualified indexer who would be aware of the best practices from a publisher’s standpoint. In our view, that makes engaging a professional indexer a better option.
An indexer would have the ability to view the text through the ideas of the reader, without the innate biases of the author.
At Virtus, indexing can be provided as an optional service. We can advise authors as to whether having an index created is worthwhile for their book.
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