Resources

My guest posts about indexing can be found on the blogs, At Least We're Here and Message in a Bottle. I was featured in the Spotlight section of the April, 2022 issue of ASI's monthly newsletter, See Also.
 

The American Society for Indexing

"The American Society for Indexing, Inc. (ASI) is a national association founded in 1968 to promote excellence in indexing and increase awareness of the value of well-written and well-designed indexes. ASI serves indexers, librarians, abstractors, editors, publishers, database producers, data searchers, product developers, technical writers, academic professionals, researchers and readers, and others concerned with indexing. It is the only professional organization in the United States devoted solely to the advancement of indexing, abstracting and related methods of information retrieval."

What should publishers know about how indexers do their job?

This webinar, "Indexing Confidential" shows how publishers and indexers can work together to create better books.

An author's perspective on the value of the indexer's work:

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, "My Last Index"

"Is Indexing an Art or a Science?", from the Lex Academic Blog

"The Human Art of Indexing", from The Bookseller

"Indexing and AI", by Tanya Izzard

A note about generative AI: Weight of the Word Indexing Service does not input or use any content, data, or information provided by clients or created by Weight of the Word Indexing Service into any generative or predictive artificial intelligence software, programs, or models.

From the Digital Publications Indexing SIG of ASI:

Statement on the Role of AI in Indexing (as at July 1, 2025)

The current assessment is that using large language model AIs (LLMs)  such as ChatGPT to generate indexes does not produce results that come  anywhere near meeting standards for excellence in Indexing.

These LLMs fail at the indexer’s primary task: to ensure readers find needed information. Tests have shown that LLMs typically underindex book-length works, do  not provide adequate structure or cross-references, and can insert false  information (hallucinations) into the index.* Each of these is problematic:

• Severe under-indexing, with as few as 20-40% of the  access points of human-generated indexes, can prevent readers from  locating desired information and mislead them into thinking that omitted  information isn’t in the book at all
• Absent/near-absent index structure, especially  cross-references, prevents the reader from effectively navigating to  subtopics and related topics while misrepresenting the focus of the book
• Hallucinations (including invented page references  and even wholly nonexistent topics) waste the reader’s time and break  the trust between the reader and the book

Future developments in AI may bring improvements, but at present the human brain of a professional indexer is still the best tool for analyzing, writing, and editing an index in full awareness of context as per quality standards.

*Bartmess, Elizabeth, “AI: Where You Can Use It and Where  You Shouldn’t,” May 31, 2025, ISC/SCI Conference 2025 “Location!  Location! Location”.

If you are interested in indexing as a career, I would love to answer any questions you have via email or Zoom and send you a list of resources! 

Favorite quotes about indexes and indexing:

 "The man who publishes a book without an index ought to be damned 10 miles beyond Hell, where the Devil himself cannot get for stinging nettles." ~ John Baynes (1758-1787)
[From the book, The Madman's Library, by Edward Brooke-Hitching.]

 "Yet  I must admit something else here, even though it will make me seem like  a megalomaniac: I love reading the index to any book I publish. It's  always my favorite part. Exploring the index from a book you created is  like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can  peruse the contents of your brain. It's the alphabetizing of your  consciousness." [ From the introduction to Chuck Klosterman's collection, X]

"Doctor Nonentity, a metaphysician...Most people think him a profound scholar: but as he seldom speaks, I cannot be positive in that particular. He generally spreads himself before the fire, folds his hands, talks little, drinks much...I am told he writes indexes to perfection." ~ Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Letter No. 7 (1759)

 [Quoted in Hazel Bell's Indexers and Indexes in Fact & Fiction]

"Writing makes civilization possible. Printing makes science possible. Indexing makes them [both] accessible." ~Peter T. Daniels [quoted in A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders]

"I did find a book about chemistry, but I didn't want to read it. It was as big as a cake and it was called 'Chemistry'. It had no index, so there was no way to look in the back of the book to see where the sections on laudanum were. You had to stumble on them. I wanted to stumble on whoever had made the decision not to put an index in the back of 'Chemistry'."  [from When Did You See Her Last by Lemony Snicket]

 "One  of the drawbacks of keeping a journal is the difficulty of finding  important entries again and so it is my practice to use one notebook as  an index to all the others. In this notebook I have allocated a certain  number of pages to each letter of the alphabet (more pages for common  letters, such as A and C; fewer for letters that occur less frequently,  for example Q and X). Under each letter I list entries by subject and  where in my Journals they are to be found." [From Piranesi by Susanna Clarke]