Index and Indexing
Abstract
According to British Standards Institution, an index is “a systematic guide to the location of words, concepts or other items in books, periodicals or other publications.” Indexing is the art of preparing an index. The ideas behind subject indexing originated from the ideas behind subject cataloguing. It was Charles Ammi Cutter who first gave in 1876 the idea of “specific subject” in his Rules for Dictionary Catalogue. Cutter also laid down some rules for multi-word compound subject representations. J. Kaiser in his Systematic Indexing laid down the rule for determining the relative significance of the different components of a compound subject. The rule said that all the subjects should be broken down into ...
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