Society of Indexers

07/01/2026

At today’s Talking about the Past Zoom meeting, 23 participants, students to retired, met to discuss a recent episode of the Early Career Researcher Podcast which discussed indexing. You can listen to the podcast via https://buff.ly/otZqb1h (or the podcast app of your choice).

All three presenters had indexed their own work, and their experience was that this was rarely funded by scholarly presses now – which chimes with the experience of our members. Many scholarly authors do, as a result, index their own work. Authors can make good indexers of their own work, but they can find it harder to take a step back from the text and focus on the needs of the readers. This can limit the scope of the index and therefore access to their research. They may also lack the understanding of indexing skills and approaches that a professional would bring.

SI members who work extensively with scholarly authors often find they need to explain aspects of indexing – why double posting or cross-references are important, for example. A constructive discussion with an author can improve the index, but it helps if they have a good understanding about what makes a quality index at the outset.
Some of our members also work in academia and explained the difficulty of securing funding for professional indexing, particularly for Early Career Researchers who may not have permanent positions, although this varies considerably between countries and individual universities.

The podcast included some interesting discussion of indexing the metatopic – the main topic of the book – and how it’s not useful to index the whole book under one heading. Sometimes some specific metatopic headings are useful, however, to point the reader to definitions, the history of the term, or new developments.

Perhaps the main difference in their descriptions of indexing as authors, compared to the professional approach, was the process. They spoke of defining key themes and then reviewing or searching for mentions. A professional indexer will read the whole book and index as they go, rather than starting with a list of keywords. This approach means that the index reflects the book more accurately and helps avoid the inclusion of minor mentions.

It was great to hear the enthusiasm for indexes both as a research tool and as a way of marketing a scholarly book, and the importance of the index when selecting texts to buy or read. We concur with their views on the limitations of AI for book indexing.

If you are looking for information on indexing for your scholarly book, our website has a Professional Directory (https://buff.ly/lCRxcX4) and also information for authors (https://buff.ly/KquLWt0) with links through to the useful blogs by Paula Clarke Bain and Tanya Izzard.

The Early Career Researcher podcast aims to provide a regular forum for discussion on all things relating to the life and work of Early Career Researchers worki

07/01/2026

Rethinking your career options in January? Book indexing attracts people from diverse backgrounds. Many of our members also work in proofreading, editing, librarianship or teaching. Explore our training course pages to find out more about adding indexing to your career - you can study online at your own pace: https://buff.ly/5GdT9tN

05/01/2026

Thinking about new career options in January? In book indexing, you'll work freelance and from home, with publishers and authors, to create useful, accessible indexes to great books. Find out whether you'd make a good indexer at https://buff.ly/AEtzR1s

19/12/2025

A happy and peaceful Christmas to all our followers.

11/12/2025

For our last Coffee Morning of 2025 we relaxed with some festive puzzles and games, joined by our friends from CILIP and CIEP.

Paula Clarke Bain discussed the overlap between cryptic crosswords and indexing, both forms of creative writing which draw on synonyms and definitions, thinking about what the reader or solver will understand, and pointing towards a target. And both forms of work are governed by rules - which are sometimes bent.

Paula sets puzzles as Pixie, and created a mini crossword for us to solve: https://buff.ly/JTpol5X

David Green talked about the history of draughts (checkers), recorded in many books and magazines. Draughts games and positions were recorded on index cards that inform computer draughts games today. Like indexing, draughts requires concentration, stamina, analytical precision and anticipating what others will do - whether opponents or readers.

David has a full run of the English Draughts Journal issues and started a spare-time index of these magazines - he's been working on it for over twenty years. This means that he's indexed his own contributions as a player and problem setter - and realised how tricky it is to index yourself, because no mention of yourself is trivial to you. This made him reflect on how indexers decide whether a mention is minor or significant.

David is also an anagrammist - like indexes, anagrams are a constrained form of writing that strive for clarity, precision and semantic resonance. You don't find many anagrams in indexes, because they are serious productions, unless they are inserted as jokes - but sometimes you do find anagrams of page numbers within an array.

Ruth Martin shared her love of jigsaws, which have the benefits of improved motor skills, sociability and aesthetic pleasure - it's like the fantasy of creating a perfect index where every heading, subheading, locator and cross-reference is absolutely right. Puzzles and games can help with wellbeing in all sorts of ways, and lot of us choose to relax with a jigsaw or crossword after a long day at the indexing desk. What's your recreation and relaxation of choice?

Thanks to Ruth for facilitating. Our January meeting will look at oddball indexes, with members sharing some examples of very niche books they've worked on.

Discover daily cryptic crosswords and join a global community of 25,000+ puzzle enthusiasts. Solve, create, and share crosswords on the complete crossword platform - MyCrossword.

03/12/2025

For today's Talking about the Past session, 18 SI members gathered to discuss dealing with titles of works in indexing.

Firstly, we discussed whether titles of works in subheadings are best interfiled with general topics or grouped together. This often depends on the length of the array and the complexity of the whole entry. It can be useful to group titles together, either under a separate 'works' main heading, or forced to sort at the end of the array. The image below shows three possibilities for dealing with this.

We also discussed inversion of articles. Various indexing standards still suggest this, although publishers' house styles are changing so you may well see "The Times" rather than "Times, The" in a main heading. It's unusual to invert articles in subheadings, although sometimes this is required.

Some books require a separate index of works, particularly if the book is about a specific writer, composer or artist. We looked at the index to a book on Handel with an index of works further subdivided by opera, oratorio and so on. Grouping works like this can make the reader work harder - how much knowledge do you need before you can find your way through the index?

Finally, we looked at how to deal with different types of title when a book covers a range of types of works. Best practice can be to identify what is meant with a gloss in parenthesis - but this can make an index long and cluttered when used throughout. Often, we'll only include a gloss where there is a clear need to distinguish between two identical titles, or to clarify an ambiguous title.

Thanks as always to Ann Hudson for facilitating this. Our next meeting will be on 7 January, and all SI members are welcome - we had the full range from student to retired members this morning, and we all learned a lot.

28/11/2025

Friday is often find-an-indexer day. How do you find the right book indexer for your book? Use our Professional Directory and you'll find an indexer with the right expertise and experience for your project https://buff.ly/xrSjoxE

26/11/2025

At our Annual General Meeting today, we welcomed new members to our Executive Board: we're being joined by Carlos Garcia-Jane and Rob Gibson. Carlos's background in librarianship and Rob's in law will be great assets to the management of the Society. Many thanks to Carlos and Rob for stepping up.

We said goodbye to Ruth Martin, who has served on Executive Board for three years to great effect, particularly in terms of her work to develop guidance for newly qualified indexers; we're glad to say that Ruth will be continuing to support the Society in other ways. And we also said farewell to W. Stephen Gilbert, who will be stepping down as editor of our newsletter SIdelights after over ten years' service. We're very grateful to Steve for his work to create such an interesting and informative quarterly newsletter for our members.

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