Ask the Indexers: working efficiently, saving time

Posted on: 16/01/2025

Photograph of library shelves full of books with ceiling lights to illuminate them

As indexers gain in experience, they develop very efficient ways of working. We asked our panel of indexers for their best efficiency and timesaving tips.

Christine Boylan, Advanced Professional Member

Don’t over-think entries. Often your first instinct about what to include is correct and, if it doesn’t feel right, leave it out or mark it for possible removal later. If a book is proving difficult to index it is likely to be a problem with how the book has been written and not your skills. In these cases do your best to make the content as accessible as you can through the index.

Nic Nicholas, Fellow

Edit as you go. For example  – if someone’s name or rank has changed as you index then  update  previous entries straight away.

Rohan Bolton, Fellow

Spend as much time as you can learning the capabilities of your indexing program, and keep learning.

Design a few templates for emails that you regularly use so that you can use copy and paste e.g. for the email that goes to the client when submitting the index, for submitting the invoice or for explaining how the links to an embedded or tagged index work.

Marian Aird, Advanced Professional Member

I’m very glad that my mother made me do a touch typing course when I was 18, as I’m sure it has made me work far more efficiently than if I was still looking at the keyboard all the time! As far as actual indexing is concerned, it will save a lot of time if you decide on the structure of the index right from the beginning, so you don’t have to go back and edit headings if you change your mind later.  Add sub-headings as you go along, even if you aren’t sure you’ll need them. It’s much easier deleting headings later than searching through the whole text trying to break down a long string of page references. Generally, making as many decisions as early on in the process as possible is a great timesaver.

Sue Penny, Advanced Professional Member

I’ve learned to take time to stand back from the text to get an idea of what it’s really about before I start indexing.

I keep an A4 spiral bound notepad by my side so that I can make notes to myself as I work.. Useful reminders,  synonyms that need unpacking, overlong strings that need looked at, word definitions (‘ontological’ is a particular bugbear).

On a very practical level, I’ve found that a big monitor and  Windows 11’s split screen option make it easy to have the text and the indexing software open next to each other.

Jan Worrall, Fellow

That’s not really the way I work. If  I can scan through the text in advance of indexing that helps the project to go better, so with an advance commission I sometimes ask for an early version of the proofs. I don’t edit much as I go, although I make notes or label things to look at again and spend a significant time on the editing, once I’ve trawled through for raw entries. I’m not sure it’s time saving, but I always enter ‘double entries’ as see refs to begin with, then review all those at the end to convert to double entry in one simple process, so that probably saves time hunting through for potential double entries.

Helen Taylor, Advanced Professional Member

I make notes on things I am not sure about as I go along, rather than spending too much time pondering them there and then. Often the solution becomes obvious later on as I work through the text, and if not I deal with my list of questions at the editing stage.

Helen Bilton, Advanced Professional Member

For repagination jobs I recommend the programme Draftable. Costs money but SO much time saved and more accurate work.

Rob Gibson, Advanced Professional Member

Take stock at the end of each project and consider whether anything could have been done quicker or in a different way. In this regard I find it useful to keep a detailed timesheet that breaks the job down into hours spent on each step of the process – pre-proofs, index entry, index edit, etc – and records issues that arose and how they were approached.

Michelle Brumby, Advanced Professional Member

I use Index Manager for embedded indexing and really appreciate the timesaving nature of its editing features and customisable Index Actions. Inspired by the Society’s MS Word embedded indexing course I subjected myself, perhaps slightly masochistically, to using Word’s built-in indexing tool for my first embedded commission, so that I could consolidate my understanding of the process of inserting index entries as XE fields. Unsurprisingly this turned out to be a massively labour-intensive, never-to-be-repeated experience, but it really made me appreciate the advantages of Index-Manager and has also increased my confidence when trouble-shooting issues that may arise when embedding in Word.

This post is part of our Ask the Indexers series. The previous post asked What is the best piece of feedback they’ve ever had, positive or negative?

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