Since 1994, Nancy Mulvany's Indexing Books has been the gold standard for thousands of professional indexers, editors, and authors. This long-awaited second edition, expanded and completely updated, will be equally revered. Like its predecessor, this edition of Indexing Books offers comprehensive, reliable treatment of indexing principles and practices relevant to authors and indexers alike. In addition to practical advice, the book presents a big-picture perspective on the nature and purpose of indexes and their role in published works. New to this edition are discussions of "information overload" and the role of the index, open-system versus closed-system indexing, electronic submission and display of indexes, and trends in software development, among other topics. Mulvany is equally comfortable focusing on the nuts and bolts of indexing—how to determine what is indexable, how to decide the depth of an index, and how to work with publisher instructions—and broadly surveying important sources of indexing guidelines such as The Chicago Manual of Style, Sun Microsystems, Oxford University Press, NISO TR03, and ISO 999. Authors will appreciate Mulvany's in-depth consideration of the costs and benefits of preparing one's own index versus hiring a professional, while professional indexers will value Mulvany's insights into computer-aided indexing. Helpful appendixes include resources for indexers, a worksheet for general index specifications, and a bibliography of sources to consult for further information on a range of topics. Indexing Books is both a practical guide and a manifesto about the vital role of the human-crafted index in the Information Age. As the standard indexing reference, it belongs on the shelves of everyone involved in writing and publishing nonfiction books.

Bell examines the history of the index and the depiction of the indexer (from diffident drudge to frankly insane) in both fact and fiction. A fascinating look at a previously little-considered element of the book.

A New York Times Editors' Choice Book Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub and Goodreads A playful history of the humble index and its outsized effect on our reading lives. Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and—of course—indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart—and we have been for eight hundred years.

Improve the performance of relational databases with indexes designed for today's hardware Over the last few years, hardware and software have advanced beyond all recognition, so it's hardly surprising that relational database performance now receives much less attention. Unfortunately, the reality is that the improved hardware hasn't kept pace with the ever-increasing quantity of data processed today. Although disk packing densities have increased enormously, making storage costs extremely low and sequential read very fast, random reads are still painfully slow. Many of the old design recommendations are therefore no longer valid-the optimal point of indexing has come a long way. Consequently many of the old problems haven't actually gone away-they have simply changed their appearance. This book provides an easy but effective approach to the design of indexes and tables. Using lots of examples and case studies, the authors describe how the DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server optimizers determine how to access data, and how CPU and response times for the resulting access paths can be quickly estimated. This enables comparisons to be made of the various designs, and helps you choose available choices for the most appropriate design. This book is intended for anyone who wants to understand the issues of SQL performance or how to design tables and indexes effectively. With this title, readers with many years of experience of relational systems will be able to better grasp the implications that have been brought into play by the introduction of new hardware.