The American Society for Indexing held its 2022 Virtual Conference, “The Future of Indexing: A Mix of Art and Technology,” on Friday, April 29, 2022 and Saturday, April 30, 2022. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In the first session on Saturday, Indexing the Metatopic–Bridging the Gap Across the Pond, presenter Melanie Gee discussed contradictory practices in the US and the UK of indexing the metatopic: always index the metatopic comprehensively, or never index the metatopic (or if you must, only sparsely). In her presentation, she referred to the stereotype of tea drinkers, UK, who never index the metatopic, and the coffee drinkers, US, who always index the metatopic. Based on a survey she conducted with about sixty respondents, she found that practices in both the US and UK are actually quite similar.
She explained that the metatopic is the overarching, main topic of the book. She said that identifying the metatopic will help you understand the structure and argument of the book. Every entry in the book is structurally related to the metatopic.
A majority of survey respondents answered that they indexed the metatopic for the last three books they indexed, with slightly more on the US side. The most common response from UK indexers about not indexing the metatopic was concern about the metatopic being too broad and not wanting to index the whole book at the entry. US indexers were mostly more concerned about the lack of general information about the metatopic and including only specific, chapter-level topics.
She then discussed different types of metatopics, such as simple, multiple, multifaceted, nebulous, and clustered metatopics, and reviewed methods for handling them in the index.
In the next blog posting I will discuss the second Saturday session of the ASI 2022 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.