Books and Articles

Remember to also visit our list of ASI Publications for even more great resources!

 

Journals

Key Words
American Society for Indexing
Contact information

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science
American Society for Information Science
Department 5189
Washington, D.C. 20061-5189
Voice: 301-495-0900
Fax: 301-495-0810
Email: asis@asis.org

The Indexer
Society of Indexers
Blades Enterprise Centre
John Street
Sheffield
S2 4SU
Telephone:44 114 292 2350
Email: info@theindexer.org

Articles

Bell, Lesley Anne. "Gaining Access to Visual Information." An independent study from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Western Ontario. (1993)

Mauer, Peg. "Embedded Indexing in FrameMaker and Word." This article includes material that originally appeared in Key Words (Jan/Feb 1998 & Sep/Oct 1998), and The Indexer (April 2000) and is posted on this site by permission of The Indexer.

Mertes, Kate. "Federal Job Classification for Indexers (NAICS 51190)" When you fill out your federal tax forms, the IRS asks you to classify your professional activities by choosing a number from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) list. This article helps you figure out what to do.

Zafran, Enid. "Do You Actually Read the Entire Book?: The Life of an Indexer." (January 2006) The article describes what it is like to be a freelance indexer and how this career fits with a background in librarianship. It is located on the Library & Information Science Professional's Career Development Center (LIScareer) website.

Zafran, Enid. Presenting a variety of indexing topics, these articles originally appeared in Key Words.

Other Key Words articles can be found on our Sampling of Articles page.

Books

Additional books can be found on our ASI Publications page.

Ament, Kurt. Indexing: A Nuts-and-Bolts Guide for Technical Writers. William Andrew, 2001. ISBN: 0815514816 Purchase this book online.

Badgett, Nan. The Accidental Indexer. Information Today, 2015. ISBN 9781573875141. Purchase this book online.

Bonura, Larry S. The Art of Indexing. New York; Chichester: Wiley, 1994. ISBN 0471014494. Purchase this book online.

Booth, Pat F. Indexing: The Manual of Good Practice. London: K.G. Saur, 2001. ISBN 3598115369. Purchase this book online.

Borko, Harold and Charles L. Bernier. Indexing Concepts and Methods. New York: Academic Press, 1978. ISBN 0121186601. Purchase this book online.

Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. University of Chicago Press: 2017. ISBN: 9780226287058. Purchase the complete book online or just the indexing chapter.

Cleveland, Donald B. Introduction to Indexing and Abstracting. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1990. ISBN 0872876772. Purchase this book online.

Feinberg, Hilda (ed). Indexing Specialized Formats and Subjects. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983. ISBN 978-1573874618. Purchase this book online.

Fetters, Linda K. Handbook of Indexing Techniques: A Guide for Beginning Indexers. 5th ed. Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2013. ISBN 0929599055. Purchase this book online.

Grefenstette, Gregory. Explorations in Automatic Thesaurus Discovery. Boston: Springer, 1994. ISBN 0792394682. Purchase this book online.

Hedden, Heather. The Accidental Taxonomist, 2nd ed. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2016. ISBN 978-1-57387-499-1. Purchase this book online.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Information and documentation - Guidelines for the content, organization and presentation of indexes. ISO 999:1996. (This is a complete revision and expansion of the 1975 ISO standard on indexes.) For more information, contact ISO.

Knight, G. Norman. Indexing, The Art of. London; Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1979. ISBN 0040290026.

Lamb, James. Website Indexes: Visitors to Content in Two Clicks. Ardleigh, Essex, England: Jalamb.com Ltd., 2006. ISBN 9781411679375. Purchase this book online.

Lancaster, F. W. Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science/Facet Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0878451226. Purchase this book online.

Lancaster, F. W. Vocabulary Control for Information Retrieval. Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press, 1986. ISBN 0878150536. Purchase this book online.

Meisheid, William. Teach Yourself Indexing for RoboHELP Classic. Ellicott City, MD: Sageline Publishing, 2000. ISBN 0967257034. Purchase this book online.

Morris, Carla D. and Steven R. Morris. How to Index Your Local Newspaper Using WordPerfect or Microsoft Word for Windows. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, Inc., 1995. ISBN 1563083051. Purchase this book online.

Mulvany, Nancy C. Indexing Books. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 2005. ISBN 0226552764. Purchase this book online.

National Information Standards Organization (U.S.) Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. (Related international standard: ISO 2788). Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, 2005. (ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005). See description on our reference page.

O'Connor, Brian C. Explorations to Indexing and Abstracting: Pointing, Virtue and Power. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, Inc., 1996. ISBN 1563081849. Purchase this book online.

Reeder, Josh. Indexing Genealogy Publications. Damascus, MD: R.D. Earnest Associates, 1994. ISBN 1879311089. Purchase this book online.

Salton, Gerard and Michael McGill. Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. ISBN 0070544840. Purchase this book online.

Salton, Gerard. Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989. ISBN 0201122278. Purchase this book online.

Smith, Sherry and Kari Kells. Inside Indexing: the Decision-Making Process. Bend, OR: Northwest Indexing Press, 2005. ISBN 0977093409. Purchase this book online.

Spiker, Sina K. and Thompson Webb. Indexing Your Book: A Practical Guide for Authors. U of Wisconsin P, 1954. ISBN 0299011739. Purchase this book online.

Stauber, Do Mi. Facing the Text: Content and Structure in Book Indexing. Eugene, OR: Cedar Row Press, 2004. ISBN 09748345-0-5. Purchase this book online.

Thatcher, Virginia. Indexes: Writing, Editing, Production. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995 . ISBN 0810829908. Purchase this book online.

Van Rijsbergen, C. J. Information Retrieval. Boston: Butterworths, 1980, 1979. ISBN 0408709294. Purchase this book online.

Wellisch, Hans. Indexing: A Basic Reading List. Port Aransas, TX: American Society of Indexers, 1994. ISBN 0936547251. Purchase this book online.

Wellisch, Hans. Indexing and Abstracting, an International Bibliography. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1980. ISBN 0874363985. Purchase this book online.

Wellisch, Hans. Indexing from A to Z. 2nd ed. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1995. ISBN 082420882X. Purchase this book online.

Additional books can be found on our ASI Publications page.