After selecting indexing terms, the next most important job of the indexer is to put them in order. It should be simple, but a small number of words cause a huge number of problems.
The articles The, A and An are three of these. You sometimes take them into account when alphabetising entries, and you sometimes ignore them. The inconsistencies in the rule so troubled me that I wrote an article for the international journal The Indexer (http://www.theindexer.org/) about them (vol. 22 pp.119-22). The theme was continued by Marc Abrahams in The Guardian (Aug 1 2006, A definite article on the definite article - http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/improbable/story/0,,1834107,00.html) and the Annals of Improbable Research, where a special THE issue considered the problems that THE causes in cataloguing, indexing and proofreading (http://improbable.com/pages/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i4/v12i4.html).
And then my THE research led to even greater notoriety....details to be revealed later in October...
As well as THE, I have also looked into problems with index entries starting with Greek letters (The alpha and the omega: filed at the beginning and the end - ANZSI Newsletter vol.1 no.10 Nov-Dec 2005 - http://www.aussi.org/anl/2005/Nov05.pdf) and first names (see an earlier blog entry).
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