Society of Indexers

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Indexing is often part of a portfolio career done alongside other salaried or freelance jobs. Our members @carlosindex.bsky.social, Susie Marques-Jones and @susanpennyindexing.bsky.social discuss indexing alongside other work in our blog series: buff.ly/wLJXKmf #WorkInPublishingWeek

Thanks as always to Ruth, and to our friends from @the-ciep.bsky.social and @cilipmdg.bsky.social, who joined us for this session and shared experiences of cataloguing and editing feminist texts. Next month's Coffee Morning on 11 December will be on indexing games and puzzles, a pre-Christmas treat.

As indexers, we always understand that the correct indexing decision is based on our judgement - the answer to most indexing queries is "It depends" and, Ruth suggests, that "It depends" can be a space for feminist indexing.

Of course, indexers will always strive to reflect the author's usage in the text, but it's important to be aware of these dilemmas to avoid status quo thinking. Peer reviews - where a group of indexers index the same text and compare outcomes - are really useful in helping deal with complexity

How should we deal with people who might potentially be excluded from the term "women"? These areas of discomfort and difficulty are a good indicator that as an indexer you need to think more about these questions.

One topic of discussion was the status of index entries for "women". If there is not a similar entry for "men", is that perpetuating male-as-default language? If there is no entry for "women" has the indexer made it harder for the reader to find the information they want?

We may not want to go so far. But indexers will recognise such feminist language issues as male-as-default terminology, the exclusion of women or topics relating to women as passing or minor mentions, and the very different meanings of near-synonyms that vary a great deal in their impact.

We also discussed the idea of feminist indexing. Dale Spender's Women of Ideas attempted to reconceptualise the index because "conventional indexes make women's experience and priorities invisible" (quoted in Bell, Hazel K., ‘Bias in Indexing and Loaded Language’, The Indexer, 17.3 (1991), p174).

Because of the complexity and detail required, indexers will need to think carefully about the fee and the time available for the indexing project.

To index these texts, we can make use of the plurality and complexity, engaging with conceptual terms to form headings. Indexers may feel like they are over-indexing, but this can be a good strategy. Index structure is particularly important to represent a complex book's interrelated topics.

They are often complex, exploring ambiguous meanings and ideas, and questioning doctrine in all its forms. They can be difficult to understand and often explore a plurality of meanings with fluid terminology. Often this comes from the use of intersectional criticism.

This morning's SI Coffee Morning discussed indexing feminist texts and feminist indexing. Ruth Martin's brilliant introduction explained what we mean by feminist texts. These are books - about law, science, art, anything really - that involve criticism from a feminist standpoint.

Hands forming a circle. Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

You'll receive our newsletter SIdelights and our journal The Indexer free of charge. Explore the benefits of membership buff.ly/HVt9ib6 #WorkInPublishingWeek

Many hands forming a circle. Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Membership of the Society of Indexers gives you much more than access to the training course. Once you're accredited, you appear in our Professional Directory, a great source of work. Our regular online and in-person events will support your CPD. Social events help you network with other indexers.

Becoming an indexer 4: the pre-qualification indexing assignment (PIA) [Photo credit: Photo by Ben White on Unsplash] Once you’ve completed the training course modules and tutorials, and passed the necessary assessments, the final

Our training course ends with the Pre-qualification Indexing Assessment, an index of a book-length work evaluated by an experienced professional indexer. This is a great dry run for professional indexing projects with detailed constructive feedback #WorkInPublishingWeek

Becoming an indexer 3: tutorials, workshops and other support [photo credit Kristin Hardwick, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons] This post follows on from the overview of the training course modules and explains how the other asp

Our online distance-learning training course isn't just the modules and assessments. It offers tutorials, mentoring and feedback from experienced professional indexers, as well as peer support. Our blog post explains how it all fits together: buff.ly/rqiBEZK #WorkInPublishingWeek

Becoming an indexer 2: the Society of Indexers training course modules Are you thinking about training as an indexer? This is the first of three blog posts that give an overview of the Society of Indexers training course. It gives

Thinking about indexing as a career during #WorkInPublishingWeek? Our online distance-learning training course will take you from beginner to accredited professional indexer. Explore the course modules and assessments in more detail through our blog post:

A happy National Indexing Day to our US friends!

Course overview/features (5th Edition) The Society runs its own distance-learning course, ‘Training in Indexing’ which leads to Accreditation and Professional Membership of the Society. Whether you a

If you're intrigued by indexing during #WorkInPublishingWeek, you can explore our online distance-learning training course and see how you might enter this fascinating line of work. Study at your own pace, with feedback and support from experienced professional indexers:

Becoming an indexer: what makes a good indexer? This is the first of a series of posts discussing how to become an indexer. In this post, Tanya Izzard discusses the attributes of a good indexer. Background Ma

Indexing is a niche but immensely satisfying role: read books, get a stimulating intellectual workout, get paid. In our blog post, indexer @tanyaizzard.bsky.social discusses the backgrounds of indexers and the attributes of good ones: buff.ly/Fe6n014 #WorkInPublishingWeek

The Indexer (@indexer.bsky.social) The international journal of indexing – essential reading for anyone interested in promoting the cause of analytical indexing in the digital age.…

We're part of an international network of indexing societies and run an international journal, buff.ly/Kfbpt13

We run a training course for new indexers; our Professional Directory is a fantastic place to find the right indexer for your project; and our CPD workshops, conferences and events support the work of indexers from all around the world.

It's #WorkInPublishingWeek 2025, so it's a good time to reintroduce ourselves. The Society of Indexers is the professional body for indexers in the UK and Ireland.

There's lots to say about this complex theme so we'll come back to it at a future meeting. In December we're returning to the theme of the history of media. Thanks as ever to Ann Hudson for facilitating these excellent sessions, and to the SI members who shared their experiences and expertise.

As Barbara Hird commented, the important thing is that your index terms should be likely to be searched for, represent the text fairly, and be durable - language changes but we want our indexes to be useful for many years.

The politics of indexing Indexers strive for equity and objectivity in their work, but indexes – like all other texts – have political implications. For our National Indexing Day blog,

Our blog post from #IndexDay this year has more on this topic: buff.ly/jdhVfc4

The cover of the journal The Indexer from April 2007, showing the table of contents

Another good resource for this topic is Christine Jacob's Indexer article 'Ethical places, ethical spaces: stopping to listen' (Vol 25, No 3, 2007) buff.ly/OSu2xYz

We also talked about the very notion of preferred and non-preferred terms introducing a hierarchy, and whether there were better ways to describe this distinction. The Getty Research Institute Vocabularies (buff.ly/UonvxC4) can be a good place to start when thinking about preferred terminology.

A useful piece of good practice shared is to flag headings for review when you've worded them yourself, rather than used terms included in the text; then you can consider later whether you have introduced any bias.