The American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the last session, And Furthermore . . .: Tips for Indexing Notes, Fred Leise shared his expertise on indexing notes.
He discussed note indexability guidelines:
- Where a note appears, as a footnote, end-of-chapter note, or end-of-text note, does not affect the indexability of the note.
- Do not index purely bibliographical notes, that is, notes that detail the source of the author’s comments and include only publication details.
- Do index notes that contain substantive information, discussing a person, place, thing, or idea. However, do not index information that is merely a continuation of the discussion in the main text.
He then discussed locators for notes and gave the single note, multiple sequential notes, and extended notes formats and examples. He also identified differentiable notes and paragraph IDs.
He concluded by giving his notes indexing process, saying that he never reads the entire content of the notes and that he quickly recognizes the difference between bibliographic and substantive notes. He outlined his steps for indexing footnotes, end-of-chapter notes, and end-of-text notes.
This concludes the series of blog postings on the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.