The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
The last session on Saturday, E-book Indexes: More than Meets the Eye, was presented by Dr. Mary Coe. Dr. Coe took audience members in the mind’s eye of the reader when presenting her research on how people find information in e-books, then shared her recommendations on how to make e-book indexes better.
She addressed the question of what is used for index locators when there are no page numbers in an e-book with active indexes, which take the reader directly to the location of the term on which they clicked. Should an index entry target land on a paragraph, line, or word? Readers can get frustrated if they don’t find exactly what they want when clicking on a term in an active index.
She said that very little research has been done on the use of indexes in e-books, with studies only asking participants if they found answers to questions and not how they found their answers. For her research, she set up a digital usability lab and gave participants tasks to explore e-book indexes.
As a result of her research, she made the following recommendations for active e-book indexes:
• make index scanning and navigating easier
• provide a link to the index from TOC or alpha navigation bars at the top to facilitate moving around the index
• match page number locators to print books if possible
• add an index icon to the toolbar or at least link the index to the TOC
• recognize how readers use an index with other tools, such as search
This concludes the blog series on the ASI 2023 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.