Essay 10 What's Going On in Indexing? Nancy C. Muivany Owner, Bayside Indexing Service 265 Arlington Ave. Kensington, CA 94707-1401 nmulvany@well.com Thus far, the 1990s have been a busy decade for indexing. There has been a flurry of publishing activity; that is, if you consider the appearance of two major books a flurry! The publication oflndexingBooks (Mulvany, 1994a) and Indexingfrom A to Z (WeUisch, 1996) filled a gap left by the now outof-print book, Indexing, The Art of (Knight, 1979). These two books are the core resources for information about indexing methods and techniques, editing indexes, formatting indexes, indexing standards, and typical publishers' style guides for indexes. Today, index writers, like technical writers, are facing the challenge of transferring their writing skills to a new medium, the electronic publishing environment. However, we all know that print-based publishing is still of major importance. Consider the following comments about an index: The index and figures of this book are indeed alone worth its whole price, because they make it much easier to use .... so that everybody who wants to find quickly something that is contained in this little book can find it. This is just the kind of statement
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