To celebrate National Indexing Day 2022 (30th March) Liverpool University Press is making a selection of articles from The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing free to read for one month.

The Indexer is published quarterly on behalf of the Society of Indexers and the journal seeks to cover the full range of subjects, from articles at the cutting edge of new techniques to contributions discussing in a practical way the new tools available to indexers at all points in the technical spectrum, or exploring the history of indexing.

National Indexing Day was established in March 2017 to commemorate the diamond anniversary of the founding of the Society of Indexers, founded in 1957.

The Society of Indexers promotes indexing, the quality of indexes and the profession of indexing. It is the only autonomous professional body for indexers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and membership is open to any person who is or intends to be directly involved in indexing.

The Indexer articles free to read for National Indexing Day

The peripheral and central indexes at Bletchley Park during the Second World War
VOL 36.3
ERIC L. NELSON

Dictionary of basic indexing terminology
VOL 39.4
JOCHEN FASSBENDER

Meandering musings on the comic fiction index: a peer review on Three men in a boat
VOL 39.3
PAULA CLARKE BAIN

The book index: child of letters, tool of knowledge, weapon of deconstruction
VOL 40.1
MICHELE COMBS

Recently published books…

Indexing Biographies and Other Stories of Human Lives
HAZEL K. BELL

Stories of human lives can be fascinating but frequently difficult to index well. The new, updated fourth edition of Hazel K. Bell’s Indexing Biographies is a valuable guide to the points for consideration when indexing life histories, biographies, autobiographies, letters and other narrative texts.

Topics include the indexing of fiction, analysis of the text before indexing, names and their various forms, appropriate language choice for index entries, impartiality of the indexer, and how to treat main characters (through appropriate subheading structure) and minor characters (where strings of locators are sometimes unavoidable).

---

Editor of The Indexer, Mary Coe, provided an update on the journal ahead of National Indexing Day:

“The complete back run of The Indexer from 1958 is now available in digital form on the Liverpool University Press website. Readers can search for content on the LUP site or they can use the indexes available on The Indexer website. Scholarly databases such as Scopus also index content from the journal. But how easy is it to search through this wealth of information? To find out, we are launching a survey on National Indexing Day (30 March) asking our readers to tell us how they look for content in The Indexer.”

Take part in the survey here.