The Science or Art of Indexing (Cecilia Peartree)
During April 2022 I did something I had never done before. This is not as exciting as it sounds, though I was unreasonably excited by the result. I think my former career in database-wrangling played a large part in the excitement, because I spent at least some of my working life trying to make it easier for people to search for information. These efforts were often foiled by people’s reluctance to use the search tools available, but that’s another story. I’ve already written on this blog about the family history narrative I published last year. Although it was framed by my own search back through the generations, I did include a list of sources, which because of the subject-matter incorporated places to visit – not that it was possible to visit most of them in real life at the time I published. However it was only recently that I thought of adding an index to the book. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place, but it might have been because I imagined any reade...