This book is the third and latest in a series designed to offer advice from practising indexers to their professional colleagues on special aspects of indexing and new developments in the field. As such, it will be especially useful to all working indexers wishing to enhance their understanding of practical techniques and current trends in what is a largely solitary profession. It may also be read with some interest by anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with the work that professional indexers do on our behalf as readers and researchers.
The book contains a useful summary of the current state of e-book indexing, in the chapter of that title by Glenda Browne and Mary Coe. It might be thought that e-books having an electronic full-text search function should have little need of a separate index. This debate goes to the heart of why we need indexes at all. A trained, experienced indexer should be able to make professional judgements about the content, structure and format of an index that will help the reader to quickly and easily locate useful references to the topic he is interested in. It is these qualities of judgement and experience that are so difficult to reproduce in a machine. Having said that, though, the advent of the e-book clearly has significant implications for the work of all professional indexers practising today. Indexing organizations both in the UK and the USA have worked hard to establish standards for e-book indexing and to provide the tools and the information their members need to approach the radically different job of indexing electronic materials.
For anyone having anything to do with Chinese names, the chapter on this topic by Lai Heung Lam, “Chinese personal names: how to decode them,” will be invaluable – “decode,” in this case, being the operative term! It explains clearly the background to Chinese names and their main formats and conventions, together with their various Romanization forms (that is, their accepted forms in Roman lettering as opposed to their original Chinese characters). To give you some idea of the possible complications involved, we learn that the surname Huang in Mandarin can be variously rendered (according to the dialect) as Hwang, Wong, Bong, Oei or Ng! Add to this that there are two main forms of written scripts, effectively two different languages (Mandarin and Cantonese) and two main Romanization systems (pinyin and Wade-Giles), and the scale of the difficulty becomes clear.
Lai Heung Lam does an excellent job of negotiating a path through these complications. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this is the clearest and best introduction to understanding Chinese names that I’ve come across, and could be recommended to anyone (not just indexers) who needs to understand how they work.
A chapter by Anne-Marie Downey on “Medical and Science Indexing” is interesting for the light it sheds on how the task of indexing can vary depending on the specific nature of the book involved and its target audience. This is where the skill and experience of the indexer is most useful (and most difficult to replicate with automatic or electronic processes). An example the author gives here is the different treatment of the term “antibodies” which she herself used, firstin a basic book for phlebotomists and then in a more advanced college biology text, where she decided that more detailed indexing was required. Another contributor, Frances S. Lennie, makes a similar point: “The same text indexed by different experienced indexers will produce indexes with strong commonalities (60 percent) and items differing (40 percent) in perceived importance or audience interest.” Except, of course, that it is very rare for the same text to be indexed more than once. Each index is, uniquely, a product of the person who produced it, which is one reason why indexing is closely akin to authorship.
Equally, I suspect, each indexer will have their own preferred method of approaching the task, but one thing that stands out from all these contributions is the authors’ evident enthusiasm for the practice of indexing, and their passion for creating some sort of useful order out of a complex text for the benefit of the end-user.
Professional indexers will of course select those chapters out of this book that have most relevance for them, but they can hardly fail to find something here of value and interest. As you might expect, the book has its own excellent index, credited to Eve Morey Christiansen. Crediting the indexer is a practice that professional indexing societies strongly advocate but which publishers very rarely follow. As a result, we only occasionally become aware of the debt we owe to these dedicated, but largely hidden, professionals whose work transforms the use we are able to make of published materials in our own reading and research.
