Indexing Place Names
Names of Places
Indexing names of places can produce similar situations and challenges to those that arise when indexing personal names, but they also have their own set of considerations for indexers.
To begin, names of places can refer to geographic names or organization names.
Geographic Names
Some considerations for indexers to beware of are places that share a name. How to treat them will depend on the context and scope of the document being indexed, and anticipated reader expectations. The use of qualifiers, modifiers, or cross references may be employed for clarity. In these cases, using qualifiers vs. modifiers might not make too much of a difference, the main concern is to remain consistent throughout the indexing process.
Mississippi (river) [uses a qualifier]
Mississippi (state)
New York (city)
New York (state)
Springfield, Vermont [uses a modifier]
Springfield, Virginia
Organizations and Subordinate Bodies
An organization is defined as an association, society, or “an administrative and functional structure (such as a business or a political party).” This can include corporations, government bureaucracies and hierarchies, churches, universities, and other groups of humans unified under one name.
Examples include:
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American Society for Indexing (ASI)
Smithsonian Institution
Department of Defense (DOD)
Acronyms and subordinate bodies may be indexed as the main entry: the National Air and Space Museum and Feer Gallery of Art are both part of the Smithsonian Institution, how they appear in the index depends on context and the anticipated expectations of the target audience.
Factors to Consider
Changes over Time
The Department of Defense, for example, used to be the Department of War (aka War Department). Providing cross references (i.e., see or see also) or double posting are two good options to resolve the challenge of understanding what readers will look for, and knowing the alternate name (War Department or Department of War) is the crucial first step.
If more than one name is used at the same time, best practice states that the most commonly used name in the book is the one that should be the preferred index term, with a see (cross) reference from the other name.
Good indexing practice also states that when the name of a place changes, it is treated as an entity (or location) that ceases to exist and the new name is the new entity that took its place.
So, discussion of the War Department would be found under that entry, while anything that discusses the Defense Department will be found under that entry. Cross references (in this case, see also) linking the two will help readers with continuity and ensuring that all information on the topic is accessible.
Department of Defense (DOD), … See also Department of War
Department of War, … See also Department of Defense
DOD. See Department of Defense (DOD)
War Department. See Department of War
While some names are easy to guess the alternatives, going to a spot where you expect to find something but seeing nothing can be frustrating and potentially discouraging. Readers in a rush might give up if there is nothing to point them to the place where the information they seek can be found. It is important to note that a term won’t appear in a back-of-the-book index if it is not discussed in the book.
Providing cross references for changed or alternate names tells the reader, “yes, what you are looking for is in the book, however the concept (or place) as it is discussed in the book can be found, here…”
Geographic names also change, for various reasons.
St. Petersburg, Russia, changed its name to Petrograd and then Leningrad during the Soviet era, and back to St. Petersburg again after 1991.
Sometimes it’s not just the names that change, but the actual boundaries. Cuba, after the 1959 revolution, restructured the provinces and changed some names while keeping others.
Foreign Places and non-Roman Alphabets
Transliteration is the biggest challenge for indexers to guess what readers will search. When a term is originally written in a language that uses a different alphabet, it is possible that there might be different ways of spelling it in English.
Different transliteration systems may be common and if a place is well-known, it is possible that the popular way of spelling it comes from an outdated system. Knowing about spelling alternatives is critical, and then of course using that knowledge to provide adequate cross references.
The Indexer’s Role
The indexer’s job in any project is to provide the appropriate access points and alternate terms that readers can use to locate information in the text, and some outside research may be called for to ensure that the client receives the highest quality index possible.
Resources for Indexers
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is one of those resources that helps one to identify the preferred name of a place, whether it is administrative (organizations) or physical (natural landscapes), and other background information that might be relevant to thesaurus users.
The fact that Getty provides the preferred name helps indexers to know what other terms might be used by readers, and will inform the creation of cross references.
The Library of Congress provides its own thesaurus, that provides with hierarchical information, preferred terms, and non-preferred terms including alternate transliterations or spellings. The terms include names of people, places, and titles of works, as well as concepts. These authorities are what appear in its catalog as subject headings.
