YOUR GO-TO INTELLIGENCE RESOURCE FOR THE SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

While indexing a biography, Heather Hedden, a taxonomist with Cengage Learning and the author of “The Accidental Taxonomist”, could not help, but compare the similarities between indexing and taxonomy creation. Generally, the back-of-the-book indexing has some similarities with taxonomy creation. Specifically, because both involve creating taxonomy terms, naming them, coming up with variant names, and relating them to each other.

Since it was a biography of a jazz saxophonist, she made sure the created index terms covered the various aspects or term types related to the music industry. Term types such as named persons, named places, person and place types, activities, music groups, music genres, record companies, and names of songs or albums are considered facets. This made her draw a comparison with faceted taxonomies, which are an increasingly common form of taxonomies or controlled vocabularies.

In addition, Heather found that being facet aware helped her create a very comprehensive index. It was rare to find a full set of facets in all the paragraphs of the biography. Therefore, she would pause to think if she could use a different aspect as an index term from among potential facet-like categories. This was another reason that drew her to the similarities between the indexing assignment she was doing and the steps involved in developing faceted taxonomies.

In the end, the index bore no resemblance to a faceted taxonomy. It was simply an alphabetical arrangement of terms, with the larger concepts further broken down with subentries. However, all the potential facets were included. However, the double posts in the index helped guide different users who think of different words for the same thing to find the text passage of the desired topic. Additionally, the terms of the different aspects—like facets—guided users in another way, by serving those who are thinking about different aspects of the book’s content and narrative.