PS: That “endless loop” recursive entry cracks me up. Slightly unprofessional perhaps, but if I saw that in a book I would laugh for days.
MsWhatsit, your critique of that work is impressive; your concerns are valid and relevant. Color me impressed.
It reminds me of the time when I submitted my first instruction manual entry while working for a military contractor in my youth, many years ago. I thought it was pretty good, but the examiner pointed out that…on page 10, there was a reference to fig. 40 on page 15, but there was no figure 40 on page 15, it was on page 16, and…well, you get the idea.
He taught me that proofreading was more extensive that just checking for typos, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
Very interesting! Thank you for sharing.
When I was a proofreader (I worked freelance and did mostly “…for Dummies” titles), I got a lot of “Oh, I’d be a good proofreader! I LOVE to read!” from people, and it always kind of cracked me up, because although sometimes I’d get an interesting book, most of my work was not exactly fascinating.
I always told people, “Go to the library and find the longest, most boring and esoteric book you can find. Take it home, and read every single word of the first 100 pages. Then read those same 100 pages again, twice, in one day. THAT’s proofreading. Finding your favorite author and curling up on the couch? Not proofreading.”
Indexing, though–that’s a whole different ballgame. I admire your dedication and am always happy to see someone making a living as a freelancer!
You mentioned your on-the-job learning, and an extension course, but what did you originally go to school for?
[Disclaimer: I’m currently working as a technical writer, branching out into knowledge management, so this is professional curiosity.]
Whoops, I can’t believe I forgot to say this before, and I’m sorry:
This is fascinating! Thank you, so much, for sharing all of this.
Well, I was your typical confused liberal arts undergrad. I declared a history major my sophomore year, but then my senior year I panicked and decided that history wasn’t marketable enough, so I did my student teaching and wound up with a degree in education and a teaching certificate. Then when I graduated I decided that what I’d really always wanted to do was to be an editor, so I looked for any job I could find that mentioned proofreading or copyediting in it. I figured that if that didn’t work out, I’d go ahead and use my teaching certificate.
My first job was basically just glorified data entry, but I used it as a stepping stone into my next job, which was a legitimate copyediting and proofreading job. They needed indexing too, so that’s where I learned the trade. Basically I just sort of fell into it, mostly because I’ve always had an abiding interest in the word trade.
It’s an odd profession in that way; nobody grows up thinking “I want to be an indexer!” People tend to just sort of…fall into it, in various ways.
Also, you’re welcome, to all those who have thanked me for sharing! Honestly, it’s always surprising to me when anyone else finds this stuff interesting.
[ol]
[li]What’s your actual workflow like? Do you write down the categories and page numbers somewhere? Is there software beyond Word/InDesign/etc. specifically designed for indexing that makes the job easier?[/li][li]Do you have the freedom to suggest to the author, “This work is really disorganized. You should restructure it”? If not, what do you do about long-winded authors who just don’t organize well? Do you ever just give up on a job?[/li][li]What do you think of Wikipedia’s populist, crowdsourced categorization system? Could that ever work for books or other single-publisher works?[/li][li]Kinda like the last question: In the old days, search engines like Yahoo used to be human-indexed. The quality of queries was usually much better, though freshness suffered. Could you see a human-indexed search engine, or some derivative thereof, working for today’s much bigger internet?[/li][li]Suppose I wanted to write a non-fiction article or book on a particular topic. Without specifying a topic, do you have any general tips on how to best organize material both for ease of indexing and ease of use?[/li][/ol]
What about indexing in e-books? The few Kindle books that I have which have indexes just go ahead and refer to page numbers within the text, unchanged from the print edition, and their indexes are just a list of topics with page numbers stripped, not even a hyperlink in sight to pop you over to that page. Sure, you could pull up the search feature and look, but without an idea of how many times it appears, you may be looking for a while before you find the relevant entry. Have you seen any better e-book indexing methods?
Are there specific authors you especially like or don’t like when you get down to indexing one of their works?
Does the fact you index influence how you read other material? Are you mentally indexing my post right now?
[quote=“Reply, post:48, topic:601977”]
[li]What’s your actual workflow like? Do you write down the categories and page numbers somewhere? Is there software beyond Word/InDesign/etc. specifically designed for indexing that makes the job easier?[/li][/quote]
Usually when I sit down with a new job, I’ll open up the PDF and start going through it and marking the page ranges for major headings. This is helpful to me later when I’m actually going through and creating the index, and also gives me a sense of what major topics are covered in the book, and how much space is given to each. Some people will actually keep a little list of main topics they intend to cover, but I usually don’t bother doing that.
When I’m finished marking up the PDF, I go back to the beginning and start with chapter 1, reading through it and identifying indexable concepts and topics. Each index entry gets its own entry in my indexing software. As mentioned up-thread, there are three main indexing software programs, Sky Index, Cindex, and Macrex. I use Sky Index, personally. At its heart it is just a database program, but it has a lot of features specific to indexing that make creating the index much easier and quicker.
[quote]
[li]Do you have the freedom to suggest to the author, “This work is really disorganized. You should restructure it”? If not, what do you do about long-winded authors who just don’t organize well? Do you ever just give up on a job?[/li][/quote]
By the time the material comes to me, it has already been through copyediting (sometimes multiple passes). The only thing left after the index is page layout and proofreading. So no, at this point, I have absolutely no input on the text itself, apart from pointing out minor typos that I might happen to see. Hopefully if disorganization is a problem, the copyediting team will have caught that prior to this point.
For a disorganized book, well, you just do what you can. Group related topics together in the index, and try as best as possible to follow the author’s organization. Where there simply is no authorial organization (and frankly, I haven’t yet run into a book that’s so bad that I could legitimately say “this has no structure or organization whatsoever”) you’d just have to try to structure the information on your own, I guess. But this hasn’t really been an issue for me. As for quitting on a job, no, that would probably not be good for my income stream, so I have not done that. (Nor have I ever been tempted, honestly.)
[quote]
[li]What do you think of Wikipedia’s populist, crowdsourced categorization system? Could that ever work for books or other single-publisher works?[/li][/quote]
Well, this is an interesting question and somewhat beyond the scope of what I do. I’ll admit that apart from looking things up on it from time to time, I’m not that familiar with the inner workings of Wikipedia or how the categorization is structured. I’m not exactly sure how you’d apply a crowd-sourcing model to a single book, although lord knows the publishing industry is changing in enough other ways, so who knows, maybe we’ll see this eventually in some way.
[quote]
[li]Kinda like the last question: In the old days, search engines like Yahoo used to be human-indexed. The quality of queries was usually much better, though freshness suffered. Could you see a human-indexed search engine, or some derivative thereof, working for today’s much bigger internet?[/li][/quote]
I dunno, I think Google does a pretty good job. I used to do volunteer work on the Open Directory Project, and while the quality of the directory was pretty good, it was just never going to keep up with the vast floods of new information being added to the Web. But I think there is still a place for such a thing, sure. Although again, this is somewhat beyond the scope of what I do. I do not profess to be an expert on web knowledge aggregation or information theory.
Outline. Just like they taught you in school. Make sure you have a solid outline, and within each outline heading, make sure that all of your material is relevant to that heading. And that’s really the best advice I can give from my end, not having written a nonfiction work myself. (Those who can’t write…index.)
E-book indexing is a giant source of frustration and irritation in my industry right now. ASI actually just formed up an e-book task force earlier this year, with the stated goal of addressing this problem. The ultimate ideal would be for nonfiction e-books to have functional indexes, where you could go to the index, look up a topic, click it, and go automatically to where the topic is mentioned in the book. Right now there are only a very few books with anything like that implemented. Usually you get useless indexes as you mentioned, or more often no index at all. I think a lot of publishers would love to just get rid of the indexes, but I’m not sure they’re going to be able to. Cookbook e-books that have been released without indexes, for example, have met with general public disapproval and (the ultimate sanction) bad Amazon reviews. So we’ll see. The industry is certainly changing.
I was talking to some of the old-timers at the last workshop (the ones who started their careers by doing indexes on actual index cards) and some of these people are really resistant to e-books and want to spend all their time talking about how much e-books suck and how print books are better, blah blah blah. Yeah, that’s nice, but the fact is that e-books are here, they’re not going away, and we all need to adjust to the new reality. The challenge now is not convincing people to quit using e-books (because, really?) but convincing publishers to include usable indexes in their e-books. I think it will happen. The industry is just in a huge state of flux right now.
I don’t actually get material from the same authors all that often. The same publishers, yes, but authors tend to come and go. On a personal level, I have liked all of the authors I’ve had a chance to have personal communication with.
Derleth, mental indexing of post, L2
indexing
–influence on reading enjoyment, L1
–mental indexing of Derleth’s post, L2
reading enjoyment, influence of indexing on, L1
Er…I mean, absolutely not.
But seriously, no, indexing is a fairly specific thing, and I don’t tend to think about it too much when I’m reading something nonfiction for my personal enjoyment. If something is really badly organized, I probably notice that a bit more than I would have otherwise. And I certainly notice when a book has a shit index these days. But I do not go around indexing my daily environment, no.
You made it to da comix:
What type of education does a typical indexer need? Do you get the same degree as librarians, is there a separate “Master of Science in Indexing” degree or something, or is it very informal and based more on your general language abilities, subject matter knowledge, and willingness to read lots and lots of books and take copious notes in the sense that your average college graduate that has a well-rounded education and very good English language skills can do it?
Another way to phrase this question could be, “If I wanted to become an indexer, I should…”
- Do you work a “9 to 5” day, or is it really more of an independent-contractor, set your own hours/as many hours as it takes type of thing? That is, do your customers expect you to be on-duty and indexing during regular business hours? I know you said that you charge by the page and not the hour.
- How is your work reviewed? Are there people that verify the completeness of your index (e.g. pointing out that you were a bit too obsessive with regards to the “Washington, George - favorite drinks” section (please remove trivialities), and forgot to mention an important reference to “Congress - In House Catering” that, in the opinion of the reviewer, really important), or are you considered so good that it is not required?
I wanted to mention another thing: When I was a freshman in college, we discovered that the index of our physics textbook was full of odd entries. Clearly the indexer had a sense of humor. The one I remember was “Animals, cruelty to”, which pointed to a page on which the classic “Shoot-the-monkey” demonstration was discussed.
psst. Cataloger != indexer - some of the skills are similar, but cataloging (as a specific skill that a cataloger would have) is about creating the metadata for the full work to be findable. Indexing is about making the detail within the full work findable to the person using the work. This is my view of the difference, anyway.
(I just may be one of those territorial librarians. I try hard to fight it. And yes, catalogers are…different. I’m not one. )
For the OP: Are you a member of any indexing organizations, like the http://www.asindexing.org ? Do you go to conferences? Do they drink a lot? Because we librarians sure do.
I’m looking to switch careers, but in 5th grade I had an appendectomy. Would I still qualify for this position, lacking an appendix?
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:35, topic:601977”]
Do you ever have a little fun in your indexes? For example, in a computer manual I wrote years ago, I had “Loop, infinite: See infinite loop” and “Infinite loop: see loop, infinite” (the text of the book never mentioned infinite loops).
[/QUOTE]
So you’re the guilty party. That’s pretty well-known.
You say you never do math. I can’t imagine anyone but a mathematician doing my books. I use special macros, \index and \indexas in tex that does all my indexing. This requires the discipline to have that always in the back of my mind when writing, especially in the case of definitions or cross-references. I cannot imagine a non-mathematician doing as well.
This, absolutely. I cannot understand publishers who choose to release a non-fiction book into the wild without an index. I once read (well, gave up on reading) Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more, which has a “list of topics” at the front, arranged by page number, and no index. You’re curious about that Reverend Moon person, but don’t know anything about him? Have fun searching through 17 pages of topics without any clue as to where you’ll actually find him discussed. Just kidding! He’s not in there. The “List of Topics” refers to the name of the Cult/ Church / Conspiracy, so without knowing that Sun Myung Moon is the founder of the Unification Church, you’re completely out of luck in terms of finding out where the book talks about him.
MsWhatsit, please feel free to tell any publishers you care to that according to your incredibly scientific survey (:D), readers badly want to see a good index.
Indexers’ educational backgrounds are all over the place. Liberal arts degrees, particularly English, seem to be strongly represented, but I know at least one guy who was a math professor in his previous career. A lot of indexers take an indexing course to learn the trade, but some don’t. There is no official certification or anything. Most of the work is freelance, so basically your work is your resumé. If you submit a good index, you’ll be hired again. If you don’t, you won’t.
I set my own hours. Due to having small children around – two of my kids are in elementary school and gone all day, but the third is only in half-day preschool so I’ve got him in the afternoons – I do most of my work in the mornings and late in the evenings. I am very frequently working until midnight or so, just because I’m a night owl and work well at that time of day, and also because sometimes I have to, in order to make a deadline. That said, I check email frequently during the regular business day, so that I can quickly respond to any queries from clients or prospective clients. There is no real expectation on my clients’ part that I will be working during any particular time period, but people do tend to expect a reasonably fast response to email queries.
As for review, it really varies. I usually only hear back if someone is unhappy with something, and so far that’s all been fairly minimal stuff. Nobody has ever contacted me to say, “This index is unacceptable.” Sometimes due to time constraints the index will go straight from me into page layout. Sometimes the publisher will have someone do a copyediting pass on it first. I assume that part of the copyediting pass is spot-checking the index to make sure that important concepts are covered, but to be honest, I’m not really sure. I’ve never had negative feedback beyond, “Could you please index the names in the footnotes as well as the names in the text?” or whatever.
Your anecdote reminds me that the first time I became aware that indexes were done by human beings and not by some sort of automated program was when I was looking through the index of one of the Straight Dope books, funnily enough. Whoever did the index did a really good job of picking up on Cecil Adams’ tone. Some of the entries are hilarious. (I don’t know where my copy is right now or I’d give some examples.)
American Society of Indexers, yes. I am a card-carrying member, or I would be if they issued cards, anyway. I’ve gone to a few of the workshops offered by the Chicago Great Lakes chapter. I hear there is significant drinking at the restaurant get-togethers but I’m usually in a hurry to drive back home to Ohio afterward, so I usually skip that part, alas.
As long as you still have both index fingers, you’re good to go.
I can’t imagine anyone but a mathematician doing a high-level math book, either. There are certain fields that really require a specialist to index the book, and high-level math is one of them.
Always good to hear. And for what it’s worth, I’ve felt the same way since long before I found myself working in this field.