Review of "Diary of a trainee indexer"

Review

by Dr Arpan Pradhan

Title: Diary of a Trainee Indexer

Author: Rohan Bolton

Year of Publication: October 2005

Journal: The Indexer Vol. 24 No. 4

The article provides the author’s experience during the Society of Indexers (SI) distance-learning training course while archiving the accreditations. The article discusses the issues faced and an overview of how to overcome them.

The author talks about the journey as a part-time researcher from 01 January 2002, through the Practical Indexing Assignment (PIA) to become an accredited indexer in May of 2005. The author states that as an initial step, researching spellings and finding errors was first attempted. Following which the author started sorting the subject terms alphabetically, provided locators to each. In the author’s view, this was enough to clear the Unit A.

Having experience at the House of Commons Library and having had a hands-on with cross-referencing helped the author with Unit B of the course to identify ‘classes of indexable concepts.’ However, Unit C became challenging to understand the rules for indexing terms having the same element. Indexstudents.com and the regulations outlined in the British Standards (BS 1749:1985 and BS ISO 999:1996) assisted in term selection and index evaluation. The author found filing rules to be taxing because of manually doing it rather than using a software. Although the author later suggests that MACREX and maybe other available software could have done an equally good job at ensuring correct denoting of the exact spacing between heading and the locators; and between the index lines.

Unit D dealt with practical business content. The unit provided the author with insights into running a small business, taxation details, and the practicalities of submitting quotes, writing publicity letters, and taking calls from potential clients. The author later took up a workshop and attended a conference to have experience and meet up with some other indexers to gain insights from their expertise.

As a final assignment to the course, the author had to index a short book. The author assessed quite many books, keeping the assignment in mind to find the perfect book with enough content to index. Finally, the author selected a book with a series of academic papers on the European Union, a compilation of essays from different authors. Later the author attended another workshop on “Editing the index,” which provided a much-needed perception to a beginner on what is not to be indexed.

Although the final PIA was ready in February 2005, the author spent weeks printing, reading, correcting, and reprinting. Finally, in May 2005, the author received the notification about passing the PIA and could be referred to as an Accredited Indexer.

At the end of the article, the author enumerates some learning experiences that a beginner could note, even jolting down the author’s total cost for becoming an Accredited Indexer.