Indexing

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established on June 1, 2008, issued its final report on December 15, 2015. In over two thousand pages of text (plus hundreds of pages of notes and references), it documents the horrors of Canada's residential school system. The report is, to put it mildly, a very tough read. To read even more than a few pages of it is a crushing experience....

Indexing

Back in 1990, Craig Brown, columnist for the Times Saturday Review, wrote, “When I tell people that I am working on an index for a book, they tend to hang their heads in sorrow. ” Reaction to the news that I was planning to attend this year’s two-day indexing conference in early June was similar. What, my friends wondered, could possibly be the attraction of an event with the...

Indexing

This is not something I ever wondered before working in publishing. In the past, I saw indexes as a minor annoyance, things that ordered me through a series of bothersome page-flips and never seemed to have what I wanted when I needed it. But I never stopped to think how one might be made.   Indexing does not seem like a human process. The end result comes in...