If, like me, you’ve written a book and find yourself having to index it, you may well wonder just where to begin. My second monograph, like the first, is being published by Routledge. They supply you with general instructions. However, having been through my entire text looking for index terms, I found myself fretting that I might have over-indexed it. (Let’s face it, in my whole career as a librarian, cataloguing a book entailed picking a handful of subject-entries to cover the whole book. On the other hand, indexing – a different task entirely – means picking index terms for every topic covered in each page or chapter, never mind the whole book.)
So, I have a great deal of respect for indexers. My biggest concern is that I may have indexed ‘passing mentions’. This is A Bad Thing in indexing terms. Nicola King’s blog post, Reviewing an Index, offers lots of good advice. Nicola explains here, how to recognise and avoid indexing a passing mention.
However she has, additionally, done a separate blog post specifically about passing mentions:- Passing Mentions: when you don’t have to index everything. The crucial advice in Nicola’s posting is as follows:-
“Passing mentions are an item or concept mentioned incidentally in the text but lacking worthwhile information about the item or concept itself. Mere mentions of the existence of something that does not provide at least one fact should be avoided in an index. Generally I try not include locators where no substantial information is provided.
“Passing mentions typically fall into four main types:
- examples (Many marsupials, including possums and bilbies, are nocturnal – entry would be marsupials or nocturnal animals, not possums or bilbies),
- lists of things or people (the group subject is the entry if it needs one)
- asides (as my predecessor, Dr Jones, might have done – no entry for Jones)
- scene setting may include passing mentions that are not followed up with what follows.
Nicola’s Reviewing an Index blog post also gives further links to useful web-pages from the Society of Indexers (by Lyndsay Marshall and Ruth Martin respectively), telling you what makes an index good, or bad. Again, we find passing mentions on the bad list!
Passing mentions
As the name suggests, a passing mention is a topic or entity that is mentioned by the author in passing. There is little or no substantive information provided in the text, and so it does not merit an entry in the index. Determining what is, and what is not, a passing mention is another core indexing skill.
I also found a pdf of Indexing Best Practices from the Institute of Certified Indexers. A useful hint that jumped out at me was about cross-references. As a librarian, I know all about See references as opposed to See also references, but I didn’t know that double-posting is preferred in certain indexing instances. So, this is very helpful to know, and I’ll have to go back through my embryonic pre-index document to make sure none of my cross-references might have led users ‘to an entry with a single locator’:-
Cross-references do not lead users to an entry with a single locator (in such instances double-posting should be used instead of cross-referencing).
Wish me luck! I can see I haven’t quite finished yet …
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 