The Indexer - Active Indexing

 The concept of Active indexing

The content is from an article published in the journal "The Indexer- The International Journal of Indexing", 2020 issue 1 of Volume 38. The article was authored by Mary Coe and Jan Wright.

E-Books today come with active indexes. Active indexing denotes a hyperlink that takes the reader to the exact page of the book. Coe and Wright (2019) describes the complexity of active indexing in their work published in The Indexer journal. 

 

For a book, the locators play an important role in getting the information back by the reader. The page number is usually a locator in a book. But for an ebook, the locator can lead to a page, word, paragraph, picture and even a single letter.

 The authors bring out the fact that selecting which part to hyperlink is a complex question.

The complexity is due to the following reasons

Who are the index users?

Preferences of author and publisher

The device and display software of ebooks

One of the very practicable problems with active indexing is the interoperability feature of ebooks. Today, they are designed to get displayed in multiple gadgets like PC, Tablets, Smartphones, where the content on the page is designed to get displayed to the full page/size of the device called a reflowable format.

This will lead to problems in indexing as there are chances that the page number will change due to this. Therefore, page number based indexing will be of little usage.

The following passage will describe various indexing locations as explained by Coe and Wright (2019).

Page Level: In this method, the top of the page is taken up and a word is identified as a locator. A small entry code is marked near the word called Markers. The following picture denotes a marker near the term Chocolate.

Source: Coe, M., & Wright, J. (2020). Looking for needles in a haystack: how do ebook reader applications handle active indexes? Part 2–dedicated e-reader devices. The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing, 38(1), 29-45.

Paragraph level:

Here the Marker is linked to the word that at the start of the paragraph.

Term Level:

The Marker is linked to a specific term in the content. As it can be observed in the picture, the term Cocoa Tea has been linked as a Marker.