Webindexing.biz

Generally-accepted indexing practices have changed over the last few decades, largely in response to sorting by computer, which led to the abandonment by many indexers of complicated filing rules. There are still a few remaining areas where the principle of ‘file it as it is, character by character, in the order it naturally comes in’ is not yet the majority rule, although I predict that the trend is that way, and in 20 years time we will have adapted further. These areas include:

• Inversion of names
• Filing of numbers in numerical order rather than digit by digit

It is a basic indexing principle that we write entries in direct order, eg, ‘hospital libraries’ rather than ‘libraries, hospital’ (with the option to add a double entry or cross-reference from the inverted form). [1] With personal names, however, we automatically invert the entry to put the surname first. One major imperative for this is the weight of tradition behind organisation of names in telephone directories, bibliographies, library catalogues, and so on. Another is the feeling that last names are somehow more permanent, important or good at distinguishing between different people than first names are. In addition, inversion of names means that (some) family members file together.

It is not so in all countries, however. In writing about the Bibliotheca Hispana, Wheatley notes [2] ‘The system upon which the authors’ names are arranged is one that at first sight might seem to give cause for ridicule; for they appear in an alphabet of Christian names, but when we consider that the Spaniards and Portuguese stand alone among European nations in respect to the importance they pay to the Christian name, and remember further that authors and others are often alluded to by their Christian names alone, we shall see a valid reason for the plan. Another point that should not be forgotten is the number of Spanish authors who have belonged to religious orders, and are never known by their surnames. This arrangement, however, necessitates a full index of surnames, and Antonio has given one which was highly praised…’ Alex Popovkin, an Index-L correspondent from Brazil, noted on 14 September 2007 that in Brazil hard copy medical records are filed by first name (this presumably reflects their Portuguese heritage). 

Inversion of names also doesn’t seem to come naturally to children. One correspondent to Index-L a few months ago noted that she was wondering about indexing multi-part surnames and had asked some children where they would look for the explorer Hernando de Soto in an index. They answered neither ‘d’ or ‘s’ but ‘h’! On a related note, many of my students say they would look for Queen Elizabeth under ‘q’ and for Harry Potter under ‘h’. Being a fictional character that makes sense, except the same people say they would look for Hermione Granger (his fellow-student) under ‘g’. When I ask them why, they say ‘Harry Potter’ has become like a brandname, but Hermione Granger remains, for them, the name of a person.

Inversion of names also causes problems where a company name starts with a person's name. For example, 'David Jones' the company files under 'D', but 'Jones, David' the person files under 'J', necessitating cross-references between the entries. In the past some of these company names were also inverted, but this doesn't seem to happen any more. 

Modern trends in web-based indexes and pseudo-indexes are towards the use of direct order of names. For example, the automatically-generated indexes to wikis have names in direct order because people usually title pages with names in direct order. There are exceptions, however, as more bibliographically-oriented wikis such as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction wiki (run by Jon Jermey) still title pages with names in inverted order.

The index to a MasterChef cookbook (MasterChef Australia: the cookbook, volume 1, Ebury Press 2009[3]) has names of participants in direct order, on the assumption that most of them will be known by first name, but not surname. There are references from surnames to first names, eg, 'Goodwin, Julie see Julie Goodwin', in case people look in the traditional location. Sometimes they could hardly be further apart, as for 'Adriano Zumbo'. (Alan Walker says that at conferences he never knows if he should be at one end or the other to find his nametag, sharing the problem with Andrew Wells'.)

The index to the Australian Government Culture and Recreation portal (http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/stories/alpha.htm) contains the following entries:

·        Bradman, Don

·        Brett Whiteley

·        Bush, Australian

·        Bush songs and music

At first I thought they had inverted names inconsistently, but then I discovered that they had covered all bases and entered names in both direct and inverted order. This is one user-friendly approach, especially in the web arena where there is not one single standard.

< Prev		Next >