A Rose by Any Other Name Would Be Hard to Find

…it may still smell just as sweet, but if no one can find it, how will they know?

Findability

The central and ultimate goal in indexing is the same as in librarianship — findability. Connecting people with the information they are looking for (and not wasting the time of the reader) is the raison d'être for indexing (and librarianship). Hence, findability.

The Name of the Game

When readers (or patrons) are searching for a term in a book index (or in a library catalog), what term do they look up first?

Predicting people’s search terms is what findability is all about. In the case of the indexer, this entails considering synonyms, alternate spellings, or alternate names, that readers might use to search for a specific topic.

Cue the index’s See reference.

See References

See references are handy tools that take into consideration the various search terms that readers are likely to use, and direct the reader to the preferred term. It’s the back-of-the-book index’s economical way of leading readers to the information they want — gathering all the page references under one preferred term. Ideally, this also suggests to the reader which term it is that the author prefers. (You guessed it, that’s where the name comes from.) Here’s an example of a See reference in action:

nunneries. See convents

In the case of multi-author works, or books where one author uses several different words for the same idea (or person), the preferred term is simply the one that shows up most frequently in the text. Sometimes more than one term is used with equal frequency and double-posting doesn’t make sense because space is a factor. It may fall to the indexer to pick a preferred term based on knowledge about reader tendencies and the topic.

If space allows, double-posting might be the best option. In those cases, instead of a See reference, the indexer just lists (or posts) the page numbers under two different terms expressing the same concept. This is nice for the readers because their information needs are satisfied immediately, without extra page-flipping.

See also References

A brief(-ish) note about another type of cross-reference: the often misunderstood, See also reference. It’s like a See reference in that it does suggest a reader check another term…but! Unlike its straightforward cousin, the See also reference can be confusing because it is present in order to provide “more and different information.”* For example,

roses, 42-45. See also plants, flowering
plants, flowering…See also roses

All rose bushes are flowering plants but not all flowering plants are rose bushes. This cross reference lets readers know where to find more information about other flowering plants, and it should be reciprocal.**

See also links related topics that are index entries in their own right. There are rules for how to use them — they can get tricky in practice, and there is such a thing as too many See also references, so it is important to index responsibly and not waste the readers’ time.

So, on that note…

See you later!

* Wellisch, Hans H. Indexing From A to Z. (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1995), 126.
**Edit: the example originally only showed the See also leading from roses to flower plants. In trying to keep an already-too-long post short, I didn’t want to show the reciprocal, but after a couple days’ worth of deliberation, I decided that since I chose to show the Narrower to Broader Term, I really should also show that in those cases, the reference ideally appears in both terms. See also cross references usually go from the Broader Term to the Narrower Term. (11/17/21)