1. PREPARATION

Before you receive page-proofs, it is useful to plan the headings you will use for the main people, places and subjects. Major themes need planning because they are referred to frequently and extensively. It is not useful to give long strings of page references for major themes. Such themes need to be broken down into sub-entries (and possibly sub-sub-entries) to indicate particular aspects of the themes as they are treated in the book. For instance, a book about the Norman Conquest of Britain will probably be full of references to William the Conqueror: under William the Conqueror, king of England and duke of Normandy, the index would need several sub-entries: e.g. coronation, gathers his army, and Harold Godwinson, lands at Hastings.

Minor entries can be dealt with later, when you compile the index: they only need a few page references and can simply be entered as you work from the proofs.

2. COMPILING THE INDEX

Whichever method you use to compile the index, you will probably find it useful to work from the page proofs by highlighting names and terms to be indexed. In the margins you can note additional cross-references or the heading you want to use to index a subject if it is different from the wording in the text.

Methods available

An index can be compiled on a set of cards. The indexer uses a separate card for each index heading and adds page references on the card as necessary while working through the page-proofs. Separate cards are needed for sub-entries and sub-sub-entries. The cards are kept in alphabetical order and added to as the work progresses. When the card collection is complete, the information on the cards is typed out in index format.

Dedicated computer programs for creating indexes (such as CINDEX™ or MACREX™) are effectively a computer equivalent of the record card file described above. However, they provide additional facilities such as consistent formatting of entries, a certain amount of consistency checking, perhaps a spelling checker (not very useful if your index contains obscure names), automatic sorting of entries and generation of the final index file. The disadvantages are that these programs are expensive and time is needed to learn how to use them.

The index can be compiled directly as a document in a word processor. Start with your first entry and add others in their correct position in the index as you go along. Before you receive the page-proofs you may already have set up an alphabetical list of the headings you intend to use; once you have the page-proofs, you can add page references and further minor headings to the existing structure.

Some word-processing applications offer indexing facilities. These facilities rely on you 'marking' words or terms in the text of your document which will be collected and sorted by the program to create the index. Although this sounds attractive it can lead to a number of problems, particularly if you attempt to create the index in the course of writing:

The task of indexing may distract you from the task of writing and so reduce the quality of your text.

The task of writing may distract you from the task of indexing. It may be difficult to index themes while concentrating on the details of your writing.

The marked term may not be what needs to appear in the index. For instance the text 'the Steward' may need to be indexed as 'James the Steward', 'Lennox' as 'Lennox, Earl of'. In addition, indexing of themes and concepts in this manner can be difficult. (Microsoft Word does allow the insertion of terms other than the actual words in the text and supports page ranges and cross-references. However, if you make use of these features you are effectively moving to a recording system as described previously.)

You will need to ensure that the pagination of your text exactly matches the pagination of your proofs.