Bridging the indexer-gap

Inspection of Google Maps taught me that Middelburg is the Dutch city located closest to England. Perhaps this fact played a role in the decision of the Society of Indexers (SI) to have their September 2010 annual conference not in the United Kingdom but in Middelburg. Middelburg is closer to Ramsgate, at crow-fly distance a mere 150 km, than it is to Arnhem. Local organization was by Dutch indexers, members of SI.
    Indexers? Librarians and information specialists, subscribers to the Dutch Informatie Professional journal, will probably associate the word with the cataloguers and subject indexers who work in libraries, even though we don’t usually call them indexers in Dutch. Products created by the Society’s indexers are quite different from enriched catalogue records. These indexers are the professional compilers of the back-of-the-book indexes that we come across mainly in quality non-fiction books.
    Perhaps you wonder why I am writing about this particular conference. The reason is that, I and two other colleagues from the information professional scene, were ‘outsiders’ invited to speak at the conference. This fact had actually confused some of our Dutch librarian colleagues. Only at the first introductory talk did they realize what kind of indexers they had ended up amongst. As a matter of fact there does exist some similarity between back-of-the-bookindexers and subject indexers in libraries. Both of them have to analyse the contents of books. Both of them have to conceive the most appropriate terms for optimal accessibility of the publication. And this has to be done in such a consistent way that the average ‘user’ is helped to get at the information he or she is looking for. From a librarian’s point of view, however, back-of-the-book-indexers practise a kind of ‘extreme indexing’. The extreme degree of depth indexing that they accomplish must guarantee the accessibility of book content on a micro-level. For most library catalogues just global indexing of the main topics of books is carried out.
    While attending the conference, I observed still another similarity. When listening to the discussions of some of the British participants, especially the older ones (i.e. those of my own age), the way they were looking at their own profession gave a strong déjà-vu feeling. This parallel with the library world was not synchronized in time, though. The fear that computers would do harm to our profession and that automation would leave us jobless was left behind 20 years ago. And the same applies to the heated discussions about full stops, dashes and commas which should or should not be used within or between certain index terms.
    It surprised me that it was hardly recognized that for indexers, e-books, for instance, and full-text searchability of the textual contents of books represent fresh opportunities rather than a threat. My Dutch colleague Evert Jagerman initiated a discussion that digital books allow interesting new methods for improved accessibility, but his ideas received only modest enthusiasm. A computerized representation of the contents of a book and of the knowledge contained therein, that can be navigated by means of topic-map-like structures, can achieve a much more flexible, sophisticated and transparent accessibility than an old-fashioned back-of-the-book index. Since these techniques are probably very labour-intensive, computer-assisted methods will be required to make such micro-indexing feasible at all. Such techniques may bring the two species of indexers closer together again, even closer than Middelburg and England.