Bridging the indexer-gap
Eric Sieverts
Inspection of Google Maps taught me that Middelburg is
the Dutch city located closest to England. Perhaps this fact
played a role in the decision of the Society of Indexers (SI)
to have their September 2010 annual conference not in the
United Kingdom but in Middelburg. Middelburg is closer
to Ramsgate, at crow-fly distance a mere 150 km, than it
is to Arnhem. Local organization was by Dutch indexers,
members of SI.
Indexers? Librarians and information specialists,
subscribers to the Dutch Informatie Professional journal, will
probably associate the word with the cataloguers and subject
indexers who work in libraries, even though we don't usually
call them indexers in Dutch. Products created by the Society's
indexers are quite different from enriched catalogue
records. These indexers are the professional compilers of
the back-of-the-book indexes that we come across mainly in
quality non-fiction books.
Perhaps you wonder why I am writing about this particular
conference. The reason is that, I and two other
colleagues from the information professional scene, were
'outsiders' invited to speak at the conference. This fact had
actually confused some of our Dutch librarian colleagues.
Only at the first introductory talk did they realize what kind
of indexers they had ended up amongst. As a matter of fact
there does exist some similarity between back-of-the-bookindexers
and subject indexers in libraries. Both of them
have to analyse the contents of books. Both of them have
to conceive the most appropriate terms for optimal accessibility
of the publication. And this has to be done in such a
consistent way that the average 'user' is helped to get at the
information he or she is looking for. From a librarian's point
of view, however, back-of-the-book-indexers practise a kind
of 'extreme indexing'. The extreme degree of depth indexing
that they accomplish must guarantee the accessibility of
book content on a micro-level. For most library catalogues
just global indexing of the main topics of books is carried
out.
While attending the conference, I observed still another
similarity. When listening to the discussions of some of the
British participants, especially the older ones (i.e. those of
my own age), the way they were looking at their own profession
gave a strong déjà-vu feeling. This parallel with the
library world was not synchronized in time, though. The fear
that computers would do harm to our profession and that
automation would leave us jobless was left behind 20 years
ago. And the same applies to the heated discussions about
full stops, dashes and commas which should or should not be
used within or between certain index terms.
It surprised me that it was hardly recognized that for
indexers, e-books, for instance, and full-text searchability of
the textual contents of books represent fresh opportunities
rather than a threat. My Dutch colleague Evert Jagerman
initiated a discussion that digital books allow interesting new
methods for improved accessibility, but his ideas received
only modest enthusiasm. A computerized representation
of the contents of a book and of the knowledge contained
therein, that can be navigated by means of topic-map-like
structures, can achieve a much more flexible, sophisticated
and transparent accessibility than an old-fashioned back-of-the-book
index. Since these techniques are probably
very labour-intensive, computer-assisted methods will be
required to make such micro-indexing feasible at all. Such
techniques may bring the two species of indexers closer
together again, even closer than Middelburg and England.
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