Value of Indexing

"If you don't find it in the index, look carefully through the entire catalogue." — Sears Roebuck catalogue of 1897.

"So essential do I consider an Index to be to every book, that I proposed to bring a Bill into Parliament to deprive an author who publishes a book without an Index of the privilege of copyright; and, moreover, to subject him, for his offence, to a pecuniary penalty." — Baron Campbell (1799-1861; Scottish lawyer and politician; Lord Chancellor 1859).

"If there is no index, the book is probably not worth reading." William J. Casey (former Director of the CIA), 1983.

"The jury in the Whitewater fraud trial went into its 24th hour of deliberation yesterday, sending out a public message of despair and bafflement when they asked the judge for an index to cover 700 exhibits, all complex documents." — The Guardian, 1996.

"In truth, a very large part of every man's reading falls overboard, and unless he has good indexes he will never find it again." — Attributed to Horace Binney (U.S. jurist, 1780-1875).

"An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it." —Mooers Calvin (one of the pioneers of Information Retrieval), 1959.
 

Fred Brown
Allegro Technical Indexing
fred.brown@allegrotechindexing.com
(613) 728-9373

May, 2001
Allegro Time!