a quick look at the american anthropological association’s (aaa) topic index for their latest annual conference presentations has me on the floor laughing. a topic index usually organizes key words in alphabetical order and points the reader to the pages in the text where those key words may be found. the aaa must have asked presenters to provide key words and created the index directly from those words, without looking to see if there were slight variations that could have been combined into one term. they even decided to keep the misspellings! here are a few samples pulled from the index:
activism
activisms
art
artist
arts
conumdrum of interpretation
food, nutrition, health [this was entered as one index term]
politcs
wellbeing
well-being
the point of an index is that it should be helpful. the aaa index of presentations is not helpful, but it sure is funny! i could continue to poke fun at this thing, but really, the aaa should get their act together. they’re a professional organization and should honor the work of their members by making that work findable in their publications.
a quick search on the internet points to many links to instructions on how to create an index. i found a particularly good one by a technical writer at how to create a usable index (http://www.idratherbewriting.com/2006/10/20/how-to-create-a-usable-index-john-mcghie/).
