Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
That only works if the referenced passages contain the exact same words/phrasing as the indexed item, which is not always the case, especially when it comes to stuff in biographies like, say:
World War I 69, 70, 74, 105
* Andrews as a spy during, 71-76, 208
to give an example from a palaeontological biography book I have right next to me.
Nowhere on page 208 does the word "spy" appear, though the passage is about his reports submitted to the US War Department gathered re: Mongolia's economy, transportation, military capability, etc. And the longer passage from pg 71-76 seem to mostly call them "intelligence missions", and avoid the actual use of the word "spying", as far as I can tell from a quick skim.
So if you don't already know exactly what terms you're looking for, search may turn out to be less than helpful when turning up results you know should be there.
And common words can really give a lot of extraneous results.
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Yes. Part of the function of an index is to apply a controlled vocabulary to concepts that may be phrased a number of various ways, and provide pointers from other vocabulary to the controlled vocabulary (Cars
see Motor vehicles). Another function would be to filter for relevancy. The proper format for an ebook index target location is location/page links, (a second choice would be page numbers that correspond to the ebook page/location and could be navigated to using the e-reader) and it should be omitted from the e-book if it doesn't have either of these because without them it is not useful.
And yes, I did edit an index (not to one book, but many sources; and yes, both in print and electronic) for many years, so I have some experience here.