This series of blog postings focuses on ethics in indexing. On March 25, 2015, Heather Ebbs presented an American Society for Indexing webinar on “Ethics in Indexing.” She discussed a number of scenarios highlighting ethical issues that indexers might face.
Censorship
An editor sends you the pages of an educational text that includes information on the creation myths of different cultures, including various aboriginal peoples, Christians, Muslims, and many others. The editor asks you to be sure to index every single mention of each Australian aboriginal group, no matter how trivial the reference. However, he instructs you just to touch broadly on aboriginal people from other countries. He tells you not to include any references to evolution, even though the author does describe it in relation to different world views in a few places in the book.
Ms. Ebbs said that it is best to base the index on the text and use cross-references. The language used in the text might be offensive, and indexers may have to weigh political correctness. The index should be an accurate representation of what’s in the text. Despite this, she said that indexers are ethically obliged to work to the client’s specifications.
- Censorship in indexing ranges from selection or deliberate exclusion of entries in the index to having no index at all.
- Some of the reasons for censoring an index include economic grounds, marketing strategy, cultural beliefs, and author requests and errors.
In future blog postings, I will discuss other ethical indexing scenarios. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com
Tags: book indexing, ethics, indexing