MAKING AN INDEX TO A GOVERNMENT REPORT

Most librarians and information officers spend some part of their time using the indexes in books; only a few have direct experience of the making of such indexes, closely related though the process is to the more familiar cataloguing and indexing of books and periodical articles which occur in most libraries. One novelty about the Index to the Report and to the Minutes of Evidence of the Company Law Committee (HM Stationery Office, 1962) is that it was produced by professional librarians in their normal course of duties, being one of the major products of the library staff now carrying out the Board of Trade Library's responsibility for providing indexes for certain of the Board's publications. However, the fact that it was the librarians who made this index is not enough in itself to make it interesting. The aim of this article is rather to describe the problems which arise, and some methods of dealing with them, in indexing a type of literature which is of particular importance in information work in the social sciences—the government report. So far as I know, there is no existing literature on this aspect of official publications: no literature, that is, which deals with the problems either of the specialized but non‐technological subject matter and language which characterize most fields of the social sciences, or of the complexity of arrangement, physical form, and programmes of publication which characterize major government inquiries in published form. The Company Law Committee's work was an outstanding example of its kind, and it is this which may lend interest to an account of its indexing.