Society of Indexers

25/11/2025

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 indexes https://buff.ly/M2d4Z3x

21/11/2025

Indexing is often part of a portfolio career done alongside other salaried or freelance jobs. Our members Carlos Garcia-Jane, Susie Marques-Jones and Sue Penny discuss indexing alongside other work in our blog series: https://buff.ly/wLJXKmf

Many of the Society of Indexers’ members combine indexing with other work. In this post, professional indexer Carlos Garcia-Jane discusses combining indexing with librarianship. My background I am a qualified, professional librarian and have worked at The British Museum and the Royal Academy of Da...

20/11/2025

This morning's SI Coffee Morning discussed indexing feminist texts and feminist indexing. Ruth Martin's brilliant introduction explained what we mean by feminist texts.
These are books - about law, science, art, anything really - that involve criticism from a feminist standpoint. They are often complex, exploring ambiguous meanings and ideas, and questioning doctrine in all its forms. They can be difficult to understand and often explore a plurality of meanings with fluid terminology. Often this comes from the use of intersectional criticism, discussing overlapping identities and forms of discrimination.

To index these texts, we can make use of the plurality and complexity, engaging with conceptual terms to form headings. Indexers may feel like they are over-indexing, but this can be a good strategy. Index structure is particularly important to represent a complex book's interrelated topics - cross-references may well play a major role. Because of the complexity and detail required, indexers will need to think carefully about the fee and the time available for the indexing project.

We also discussed the idea of feminist indexing. Dale Spender's Women of Ideas attempted to reconceptualise the index because "conventional indexes make women's experience and priorities invisible" (quoted in Bell, Hazel K., ‘Bias in Indexing and Loaded Language’, The Indexer, 17.3 (1991), p174). We may not want to go so far. But indexers will recognise such feminist language issues as male-as-default terminology, the exclusion of women or topics relating to women as passing or minor mentions, and the very different meanings of near-synonyms that vary a great deal in their impact. Is a person who has experienced an assault a survivor, a victim or a complainant?

One topic of discussion was the status of index entries for "women". If there is not a similar entry for "men", is that perpetuating male-as-default language? If, for that reason, there is no entry for "women" but there is discussion of the topic as it relates to women in the book, has the indexer made it harder for the reader to find the information they want? How should we deal with people who might potentially be excluded from the term "women"? These areas of discomfort and difficulty are a good indicator that as an indexer you need to think more about these questions.

Of course, indexers will always strive to reflect the author's usage in the text, but it is important to be aware of these dilemmas to avoid status quo thinking. Peer reviews - where a group of indexers index the same text and compare their outcomes - can be a fantastic way of evaluating how you handle complex and sensitive issues in indexes. As indexers, we always understand that the correct indexing decision is based on our judgement - the answer to most indexing queries is "It depends" and, Ruth suggests, that "It depends" can be a space for feminist indexing.

Thanks as always to Ruth, and to our friends from CIEP and CILIP's Metadata & Discovery group, who joined us for this session and shared experiences of cataloguing and editing feminist texts. Next month's Coffee Morning, on 11 December, will look at indexing games and puzzles, as a pre-Christmas treat.

20/11/2025

Membership of the Society of Indexers gives you much more than access to the training course. Once you're accredited, you appear in our Professional Directory, a great source of work; our regular online and in-person events will support your CPD; our social events help you network with other indexers; and you'll receive our newsletter SIdelights and our journal The Indexer free of charge. Explore the benefits of membership https://buff.ly/HVt9ib6

19/11/2025

Our online distance-learning training course concludes with the Pre-qualification Indexing Assessment, an index of a book-length work that is evaluated by an experienced professional indexer. This is a great dry run for professional indexing projects and you'll get detailed constructive feedback on the index you create.

Once you’ve completed the training course modules and tutorials, and passed the necessary assessments, the final stage before you start your professional indexing career is to complete the pre-qualification indexing assignment, known as the PIA. What is the PIA? The PIA is an index to a complete b...

19/11/2025

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: https://buff.ly/rqiBEZK

19/11/2025

Thinking about indexing as a career during ? Our online distance-learning training course will take you from beginner to accredited professional indexer. Explore the course modules and assessments in more detail through our blog post:

Are you thinking about training as an indexer? This is the first of three blog posts that give an overview of the Society of Indexers training course. It gives an overview of the different elements of the course and describes the modules that deliver the theoretical content of the course. About the....

18/11/2025

If you're intrigued by indexing during , you can explore our online distance-learning training course and see how you might enter this fascinating line of work. Study at your own pace, with feedback and support from experienced professional indexers:

The Society runs its own distance-learning course, ‘Training in Indexing’ which leads to Accreditation and Professional Membership of the Society. Whether you are interested in developing a professional career in indexing, or would like to extend your knowledge of indexing in order to enhance yo...

17/11/2025

Indexing is a niche role but an immensely satisfying one: read books, get a stimulating intellectual workout, and get paid. But who are the indexers? In our blog post, indexer Tanya Izzard explains the varieties of backgrounds of indexers, and the skills and attributes that mean you might be a good indexer yourself: https://buff.ly/Fe6n014

This is the first of a series of posts discussing how to become an indexer. In this post, Tanya Izzard discusses the attributes of a good indexer. Background Many indexers come from a library and information science background, but almost any previous career will give you knowledge and experience th...

17/11/2025

It's 2025, so it's a good time to reintroduce ourselves. The Society of Indexers is the professional body for indexers in the UK and Ireland.

We run a training course for new indexers; our Professional Directory is a fantastic place to find the right indexer for your project; and our CPD workshops, conferences and events support the work of indexers from all around the world.

We're part of an international network of indexing societies and run an international journal, The Indexer

05/11/2025

For today's Talking about the Past session, 19 indexers gathered on Zoom to discuss bias in indexing. We all have our prejudices, ideas and beliefs - but indexers work to make sure we are aware of them when we approach a text.

Aspects of bias in indexing include
⦁ wording of entries
⦁ inclusion/exclusion of terms and concepts
⦁ how we recognise our own bias
⦁ working on texts or with authors we disagree with

We talked about changes to terminology, especially in sensitive areas. In history writing now 'enslavement' is often used in preference to 'slavery'; however, indexers may still need to include a cross-reference from 'slavery' because it's still a likely sought term. Similarly, changing vocabularies around gender and sexuality can need careful handling.

We also discussed including emotional flavour in index terms, especially for biographical works. Should we include this or do we make more neutral headings that efface this? Could including it cause the index to "usurp the function of the text itself", as indexer Douglas Matthews suggested?

Inclusion in indexing is another area where bias and neutrality need to be considered. Women have been historically excluded from indexes, as have 'insignificant' ordinary people and people who are otherwise marginalised. Whether they are indexable depends on the text and its likely readers, and is influenced by the space available for the index.

A useful piece of good practice shared is to flag headings for review when you've worded them yourself, rather than used terms included in the text; then you can consider later whether you have introduced any bias.

We also talked about the very notion of preferred and non-preferred terms introducing a hierarchy, and whether there were better ways to describe this distinction. The Getty Research Institute Vocabularies (https://buff.ly/UonvxC4) can be a good place to start when thinking about preferred terminology.

Another good resource for this topic is Christine Jacob's Indexer article 'Ethical places, ethical spaces: stopping to listen' (Vol 25, No 3, 2007)https://buff.ly/OSu2xYz

As Barbara Hird commented, the important thing is that your index terms should be relevant to the reader, represent the text fairly, and be durable - language changes but we want our indexes to be useful for many years.

There's lots to say about this complex theme so we'll come back to it at a future meeting. Next time we're returning to the theme of the history of media. Thanks as ever to Ann Hudson for facilitating these excellent sessions, and to the SI members who shared their experiences and expertise.

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

04/11/2025

You might have been asked to provide an embedded index for your book, or find an indexer who can create one. What is this thing called embedded indexing? Indexer Tanya Izzard explains how it works in our latest blog post:

While most indexes are still compiled from page proofs, some indexes are embedded, where the index entries are added as tags or codes to a manuscript file. In t