Society of Indexers

07/09/2026

Our online distance-learning training course isn't just the modules and assessments. There is support throughout from experienced professional indexers in the form of tutorials and mentoring, as well as peer support from fellow students. Our blog post explains how it all fits together:

[photo credit Kristin Hardwick, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons] This post follows on from the overview of the training course modules and explains how the other asp

04/09/2026

Need an indexer for your non-fiction book? In our Professional Directory, you can search on subject, type of publication and type of indexing to find the best indexer for your project. https://www.indexers.org.uk/find-an-indexer/directory/

03/09/2026

Are you a publishing professional who’s new to working with book indexers? Our guide to commissioning an index takes you through the whole process and helps you foster good working relationships and great indexeshttps://www.indexers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Commissioning-an-index-13-Sep-22.pdf

02/09/2026

At today’s Talking about the Past session, indexer Pauline Hubner shared her experience of indexing illustrated books. Pauline also works as a picture researcher, which has some crossover skills with indexing – considering the needs of the reader, and identifying search terms that will help find images that amplify the themes of a book.

Pauline mainly works on illustrated books and exhibition catalogues. These books tend to be very well structured and designed, and as well as lots of illustrations often include a lot of text. The publishers and authors of these books often want a spare, ‘clean’ index in terms of format and layout, which means the indexer needs to simplify and consolidate. Clients may also want to review the index very carefully to make sure it’s in line with curatorial standards.

Readers and reading practices can vary hugely; a monograph on a single artist may be read cover to cover, but readers of a thematic survey might be more likely to dip in to the text. The age range and specific interests of readers for exhibition catalogues can be very diverse.

Key issues for indexing illustrated books include how you deal with locators for illustrations; the best approach to indexing titles of works, especially where many of them might start with ‘Untitled’; and how to address names of artists and their subjects, especially where the latter’s names might be unknown or ambiguous.

Challenges include avoiding over-indexing or over-complicating the index. All of us present identified with this, and the pitfall of getting too involved, intellectually, with the index. This can be a good point in a project to go for a walk.

Pauline shared lots of useful examples of her work, showing her indexing process and how she approaches a complex project. She has indexed the catalogue for the forthcoming British Library exhibition on Agatha Christie, and this was a fascinating case study on how to deal with a broad, complex topic with very diverse themes, proliferating titles of works, and incorporate a huge range of visual material into the index.

Many thanks to Pauline for this fascinating discussion, and to Ann Hudson for facilitating. Next month, on 7 October, we’ll be discussing indexing personal names, a perennial challenge. All SI members are very welcome to take part.

24/08/2026

Today's the deadline to submit your proposal for our 2026 conference. will be held online on 11 and 12 November, and our theme this year is collaboration in indexing. Find out more and submit your proposal via

Call for contributions The Society of Indexers invites contributions for our 2026 online conference, taking place via Zoom on 11–12 November 2026. We will have

21/08/2026

Indexing is a profession that’s associated with consistency, balance and attention to detail, rather than rebellion. However, at yesterday’s Society of Indexers Coffee Morning, we talked about breaking the rules in indexing. We often speak of guidelines for indexing, rather than rules – one of our most frequently uttered phrases is “It depends” – although there are some guidelines that have a lot of force and that we usually want to follow rather than ignore.

Christine Boylan shared a couple of indexes that she had read that broke the rules in some interesting and slightly baffling ways. The first, a book on groups in mathematics, had an unusual approach to locators; rather than including a page span for a whole chapter, it simply used the locator “Chapter 5”. This makes work for the reader, who must go to the table of contents to find the relevant start page for the chapter. The same index had some mystifying decisions on alphabetical sort order for mathematical symbols which none of us could understand – a good example of a decision being perfectly clear to the indexer, but utterly obscure to the index user, and of why we build so much review and reflection into our indexing processes.

The second was a book about alphabets, beautifully designed and with excellent illustrations and figures – but the design had overwhelmed usability somewhat, leading to long sections without page numbers. This meant the indexer had set up a very complex model of locators to help readers find the information they wanted. It was a salutary lesson on pursuing simplicity in our practice where possible.

Ann Hudson shared an example from a recent project where she had to deal with a very long string of locators, all referring to images of churches made by a single artist. Avoiding long strings of locators is one of the guidelines that most of us try to stick to, but in this case breaking it down was a challenge. Ann looked at using placenames, but that made the whole entry incredibly long. Her solution was to separate out the locators by artistic medium – this still resulted in some long strings but was probably the best option for this book. If you want to know about the artist, this is useful information. We love to help the reader out by breaking down those long strings, so you can find information more easily, but again, the simplest approach can often be the best one.

You can read more about the things we try to avoid in indexing – and the rules we try to keep – in indexer Ruth Martin’s blog post https://www.indexers.org.uk/posts/qualities-of-a-bad-index/. Thanks as ever to Ruth for facilitating this entertaining and educational meeting.

In this post, Ruth Martin outlines the things that shouldn’t appear in an index. Write a bad index… us?! Surely members of the Society of Indexers couldn’t writ

20/08/2026

There's still time to propose a plenary talk, breakout session or lightning talk for - our conference is online on 11 & 12 November and this year we're focusing on collaboration in indexing. Find out more and submit your proposal via

Call for contributions The Society of Indexers invites contributions for our 2026 online conference, taking place via Zoom on 11–12 November 2026. We will have

06/08/2026

Do you have something to say about collaboration in book indexing? Propose a plenary talk, a breakout session or a lightning talk for our 2026 conference! This takes place online on 11 & 12 November, and the theme is collaboration. Find out more and submit your proposal via

Call for contributions The Society of Indexers invites contributions for our 2026 online conference, taking place via Zoom on 11–12 November 2026. We will have

05/08/2026

For this morning’s Talking about the Past Zoom session, 22 indexers – with about 300 years of cumulative indexing experience between them – met to discuss passing mentions. We took as a starting point the article “What not to index: a flow chart for passing mentions in book indexing” by Emma Warnken Johnson (Indexer 44 (2), June 2026 – paywall) which includes a flow chart for identifying passing mentions and making indexing decisions about them. Deciding what to leave out can be the most demanding part of indexing; Emma’s flowchart aims to improve consistency and avoid decision fatigue.

The flowchart is not for every entry, but only for those where there is some doubt about including a term. Emma’s flowchart uses the number or volume of mentions of a term, and its relation to the metatopic – the overarching topic of the book – as criteria for making decisions on its inclusion. Underpinning this is expert use of indexing software, which allows us to flag or label entries for review when editing the index.

Our group all agreed that these can be difficult decisions to make, and the flowchart generated a lot of debate. Considering proximity of a term to the metatopic can be helpful, but in very detailed books, what look like dozens of passing mentions all need to be indexed. And there are degrees of relation to the metatopic, so thinking about terms in this way can introduce more decisions, rather than cutting them down. And what looks like a passing mention at first sight might be a vital reference for the returning reader, who always needs to be considered along with readers exploring the book via the index.

As indexers, we are balancing the needs of the reader against representing the knowledge included in the book. The flowchart questions could work to help us consider whether we SHOULD include a term - will the index be diminished without it? and whether we COULD - can we make an argument for including it? As Rachel Gee said, indexers have a meta-indexing thought process going on while we index, and it’s important to listen to this and be aware of the reasons for our choices.

We acknowledged that decision fatigue is real, but not all present thought a flowchart was a solution – a break away from your desk can often be a better one.

Emma’s flowchart, like most writing on indexing, provides guidelines rather than rules. She has built flexibility into it, recognising that texts vary hugely, and noting that other factors – like reader and author expectations and considerations of fairness, visibility and representation – may change them. Her article stimulated a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about how we make our indexing decisions.

In September our discussion will focus on indexing exhibition catalogues and in October we’ll return to the topic of indexing personal names. If you’re an SI member, do join us then – all members, from students to retired indexers, are very welcome.

You can read more about passing mentions in our blog post:

Women’s cycling road race by Bob Mical, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 licence [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/] One of the most frequent que