17 October 2025
In 26 weeks, the Indexing Society of Canada/Société canadienne d’indexation will be holding its virtual conference. The theme for 2026 is Sorting It Out, so in preparation for the conference—and as a way to kick my blog back into life—I’ll be doing a post a week, naturally sorted alphabetically.
Author’s Overview
Often when indexing there are discussions that need to be picked up, but they don’t readily lend themselves to a subheading. Most frequently, these occur at start and end of chapters and major sections, presaging and summarizing the more in-depth arguments. They can also be found in the book’s introduction and conclusion, especially when there’s a chapter break-down. For readers, ready access to these summaries can be essential for placing the author’s argument in context, or simply for having the big-picture framework for the nitty-gritty details.
For the indexer, the question isn’t whether to pick these discussions up, it’s where to place them in the index.
Some indexers list the page numbers for these summaries immediately after the main headings, even if there are subheadings that follow. The result can look something like this:
- Subura valley, 12-14
- commercial activity
ideological landscape
imperial interventions
Jewish community
Juvenal’s views on
Martial’s views on
Ovid’s views on
prostitution in
public monuments
reputational decline
residential occupation
sacred landscape
Tacitus’s views on
thermae in
- commercial activity
While placing the page range up front makes the discussion nice and visible for the reader, the problem is that the reader has no guidance for what those pages point to. Page numbers from early in the book might lead the reader to guess that it’s a summarizing discussion from the introduction, but what if the pages fall in the middle of the book? Or if there are multiple summarizing discussions?
Even indexers disagree on how to interpret a page range sitting in the position of 12–14 above. Some will tell you it’s clearly the overview or definition of the main topic, or the most important discussion; others will say it’s the least important (what might once have gone under the subheading passim, back when publishers still used that convention); and still others will suggest those unanchored numbers are an editing oversight on the part of the indexer and there’s no way to know what they signify.
If professional indexers don’t agree, it seems unwise to expect the average reader to divine the indexer’s intended meaning.
Indexers have a variety of other options at their disposal. One is to chop up the discussion into its constituent bits, which likely correspond to the subheadings already created, even if each bit is only a single phrase or sentence. Though technically accurate, splitting out the discussion this way both makes the index array inelegant through the over-indexing of a handful of pages and it does a disservice to the reader by losing the essence of what makes that discussion unique and valuable.
Indexers traditionally avoid this difficulty by finding a term to use as a subheading that will clue readers in. Favourites tend to be introduction, overview, summary, and about. The first three are all reasonable, but have the disadvantage of sorting somewhere in the middle of the other subheadings, risking them being overlooked.
- Subura valley
- commercial activity
ideological landscape
imperial interventions
Jewish community
Juvenal’s views on
Martial’s views on
Ovid’s views on
prostitution in
public monuments
reputational decline
residential occupation
sacred landscape
summary
Tacitus’s views on
thermae in
- commercial activity
Some indexers resolve this problem by force sorting a term such as overview to the top, so it will be the first subheading a reader sees.
- Subura valley
- overview
commercial activity
ideological landscape
imperial interventions
Jewish community
Juvenal’s views on
Martial’s views on
- overview
Another option is to use about, which will almost always be the first subheading without any need for intervention. The downside to about is that a snarky reader might look at it and note that all the subheadings under a given term are about the topic, making this particular term seem ludicrous or (worse) lazy.
My solution (one I do not claim to have invented) is to use the phrase author’s overview. It combines my preferred way of thinking about these kinds of discussions (especially because they aren’t always introductory or summative), signals that the reader will be getting a very direct look at how the author thinks about the topic, and sorts close enough to the beginning of the list of subheadings that I can safely assume a reader will spot it without my meddling with alphabetical order.