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INDEXING
AND BACK MATTER
Posted January 24, 2004
| SUMMARYTwo marks of a textbook, a scholarly book or a professional book, in contrast to many trade books, are a bibliography and an index. These are features geared to helping readers make use of the book. Over the years standards have been devised for presentation and format. |
By Frank Silverman
Marquette University and the Medical College of Wisconsin
Textbooks and professional books require references and an index. If you want libraries to acquire your reference work or nonfiction trade book, you likewise must provide an index and a bibliography. Here are guidelines for preparing back matter.
In scholarly works, textbooks, professional trade books, and other academic materials, an index is essential. A good index helps the reader find critical information with minimum page turning and frustration. An index can be created by the author or by a professional indexer. If you index your book yourself, you might find the following general procedures helpful in developing the index.
Identify the audience for whom you are writing the index.
Identify valid (indexable) keywords (terms and concepts) for inclusion in index entries.
Decide how to organize the information in your index and arrange your entries and subentries.
Develop a style guide and format and apply them systematically throughout.
Create and phrase index entries, including alternative terms.
Bring together related information, cross-referencing appropriately.
Create a usable index, and test it for usability.
Edit for style, readability, content, accuracy, and space.
The chapter appendix offers leads to information about indexing software.
Wording and formatting index entries is a communication skill. You will need to decide whether to include gerunds, phrases beginning with prepositions, or guideword locators, for example, and whether to indent, run-in, or turn over lines. There also is more than one way to alphabetize an index. The more you decide in advance, the smoother your indexing process will go as you work page by page.
For example, decide in advance what classes of information to include or exclude. Will you include or exclude place names, author names, acronyms, abbreviations, or numerical references in your index? Will you include key terms and phrases from your headings and captions? How much will you differentiate within and between terms and concepts? Will your index be too thin or too dense? How much information is enough? Your choices for what to include and exclude should be based on what your readers are likely to need or want to know and what vocabulary they are likely to use to try to locate this information in your book.
Two kinds of indexes for textbooks are author indexes and subject indexes. You may or may not want to prepare an author index in addition to a subject index. In some content areas an author index might increase adoptions. If you cite the research and publications of the instructors who teaches the course, they might be more likely to adopt it. Instructors naturally would like their students to be aware of their professional work and, consequently tend to react favorably to a textbook in which their work is mentioned.
Indexing Software
There is special software for indexing. The American Society of Indexers' publication, Software for Indexing (Schroeder, 2003) evaluates programs available for PCs and Macs. Also, most word processing programs have the capability to generate an index. In addition, any word processing program that has a "Find" command can be used. The first time you refer to an item, you enter it into an index file at the appropriate point alphabetically. Whenever you want to refer to it again, you use the "Find" function to locate it quickly. I have indexed seven textbooks in this simple way.
If your book is not a first edition, the index from the current edition can be quite useful for indexing, particularly if you have it on your hard drive or on disk. Your first task is to delete items in the index that are not relevant to or accurate for the new edition, including page numbers. I have used my word processor's "Find and Replace" command to delete page numbers efficiently. I simply ask the program to "Find" each of the ten digits from 0 to 9 and to "Replace" each digit with nothing-i.e., leaving the "Replace" entry space blank. After issuing the "Find and Replace" command 10 times, once for each of the 10 digits, there would remain a series of commas after each item in the index, with each comma separated from the next by a space. To delete these commas and spaces, use the "Find and Replace" command to locate each instance of "space comma" and leave the "Replace" space blank. This process usually takes less than 30 minutes.
The use of the automatic indexing capability of word processing programs has a serious limitation if the numbering of the pages in the manuscript does not conform exactly to the numbering of the book pages (called folios). It is difficult to make the number of characters on manuscript pages correspond to book pages unless you are preparing camera-ready pages using the same program you used to draft the manuscript. In commercial textbook publishing accurate indexes are created from final page proof after it is certain that folios will not change.
Indexing Help
The quality of your textbook's index can significantly affect its acceptance and sales. It takes time to develop a good index, and you can arrange to have your book indexed by a freelance indexer. Most professional indexers charge between $1.50 and $3.00 per page, as they read every page to construct the index. Alternatively, indexers may charge $.50 to $.75 per index entry. It is crucial to find an indexer who is knowledgeable about the topics in your book.
There are several ways to search for a competent freelance indexer. One is to seek recommendations from other self-publishers. A second is to seek recommendations from a university press at your institution or another. And a third is to search the American Society of Indexers' Web site (www.asindexing.org/site/) for its ASI Indexer Locator. The Locator can be accessed from the Society's Web site and contains a listing and description of the experience of many freelance indexers.
Preparing Other Back Matter
Other than an index, textbooks and instructional materials typically have endnotes or references and a bibliography. That is, it is expected that, other than having a subject index and possibly an author index, textbooks and instructional materials will cite sources and thus will need end notes or references and a bibliography in the back matter. Endnotes for parenthetical source citations may be gathered at the back of the book by chapter, or may be given at the ends of the chapters in which they appear. Source citations also may appear in footnotes, but footnotes are reserved for scholarly works rather than textbooks. Note also that footnotes greatly increase production and manufacturing costs on a per-page basis, because they require selective manual override in printing outside of the text block.
In contrast to endnotes, references comprise a single alphabetical list of all the sources you cited or referred to, and these, too, can be gathered as chapter end matter or as book end matter. Bibliographies, on the other hand, include all the works that you consulted in writing your book, whether or not you had occasion to cite them specifically. In student textbooks, special annotated bibliographies in the chapter end matter might suggest specific readings for students.
Student textbooks also often have one or more appendices and a glossary in the back matter. These are pedagogical tools to enhance text content and aid learning. In many undergraduate textbooks, key terms and concepts are boldfaced in the chapter narrative and then defined in an end-of-book glossary. These elements, like other back matter, may be presented alternatively as chapter end matter. The usual sequence of back matter, following the book's conclusion or epilogue, is Appendix, Glossary, Notes, References, Bibliography, Author Index, and Subject Index.
Robust glossaries, references, and bibliographies are important resources for students and also serve as another checkpoint for instructors when they make decisions about course adoptions. Whichever end matter and back matter elements you use, you should consistently follow the academic style you have chosen for formatting them. As examples of treatments of front matter and back matter elements, see the front matter and back matter of this book.
Online Resources for Preparing Back Matter
How to prepare front and back matter
ickn
webstyleguide.com
Examples of Glossary Styles (online glossaries of writing and publishing terms)
umuc.edu
txtx.essortment.com
freelancewrite.about.com
Indexing Resources on the Web
American Society of Indexers on Indexing
American Society of Indexers on Indexing Software
wINDEX
Web Site Indexing Software
Software for Indexing
Best Practices in Indexing
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SILVERMAN
| This how-to column is from a chapter in Self-Publishing Textbooks and Instructional Materials,by Franklin H. Silverman, (c) Atlantic Path Publishing, 2004. AAll rights reserved.. This book is available from the publisher at half price in a prepublication special-good through February 15, 2004. See Atlantic Path Publishing |
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