SPECIALIST INDEXING for ENGINEERING, SCIENCE, TECHINCAL and ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

INDEXER

• Atholl Robertson, principal of OGC Engineers, is a chartered engineer with more than 45 years’ industrial experience in process, mechanical utilities and electrical engineering.

• Atholl has Masters degrees in English and in Electrical Engineering and a B.Eng. level qualification in Mechanical Utilities. He is a long term member of the American Society for Indexing having successfully completed the Training Course Modules. He is also a qualified proofreader and technical editor.

Contact details:
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www.ogcengineers.com/index

What is an index?
An index is a route-map guiding the reader to destinations in the text pertinent to the information sought and also indicating alternative byways of related interest leading to further enlightenment
OGC Indexing working definition

OGC Engineers Indexing Services

OGC Engineers provides a specialist indexing service for Engineering and Technical publications, including mechanical, electrical, process and chemical engineering, and scientific and mathematical subjects including physics, chemistry, biological sciences and matters celestial. OGC Engineers also provides indexing for publications over a wide range of other academic and related subjects including English literature, classical music, historical works, education and policy.

Although an author may compile an index, a qualified and experienced indexer is trained to produce a professional index which adequately reflects the content, idiom and nuances of the work in a way that increases its ease of access and value to the reader or researcher. Indexing draws on the same disciplines that engineering does – systematic organisation, clear classification, careful use of language and respect for the reader’s needs that only a human can provide.

What OGC indexes

Anything useful to a reader having a specific question and requiring a quick answer

• Textbooks and general interest books
• Academic Journals – periodical and cumulative indexes
• Doctorate and Masters theses, monographs and edited compilations
• Academic publications, dissertations and theses
• Technical design criteria, investigation and forensic engineering reports
• Descriptive, narrative and operating philosophies
• Instruction, operating and maintenance manuals
• Tender documentation, record books and close-out reports

Indexes — variants and standards

The index formatting and layout styles are numerous and are usually specified and defined by the author or publisher. The most common standards are International Organization for Standardization (ISO 999) and Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS); many academic and general publishers, and statutory bodies have in-house index specifications.

AI and Indexing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) saves time and effort and ensures accuracy when doing repetitive and detailed research and related tasks. With appropriate prompting it is able to adapt tasks to follow specific sets of rules in an optimum way to produce a refined result. It is especially useful in researching, collating and presenting information gleaned from a variety of sources and large data sets and as such is well suited to tasks such as software algorithm development, legal case analyses and general collation and presentation of information.

AI cannot effectively replace a human’s broad multi-genre range of knowledge, native judgement and the ability to fully consider contextual idiomatic nuances, all of which are essential to producing a professional index. A recent American Society for Indexing report [hyperlink attached file Can_LLM-generated_Book_Indexes_Replace_Professional_Indexes.pdf into webpage] into the use of AI (LLMs) for indexing found many shortcomings in currently available AI packages including lack of completeness, failure to identify related topics, extraneous and incorrect references, and structural inadequacies:

AI cannot replace professional book indexers and we are doubtful that it will be able to do so soon, or even at all…The indexes produced would require substantial error-checking and remediation before being passed to a client….error-checking and remediation are time-consuming and it is often more efficient to simply index the book from scratch….
Determining  which subheadings are appropriate and necessary for a given  entry involves reading and understanding the passages under  discussion, ideally in the context of the rest of the book. Identifying and fixing problematic entries in an existing  untrustworthy index requires manually checking every entry; it is faster and easier to read and index the book correctly.

Indexes produced by OGC Engineers are 100 per cent human work supplemented only by well-established Index formatting packages such as Sky®, Macrex®, Cindex®, DexEmbed®

To follow:-
Fees (In preparation)
References: Etc (future)
Blog space: (future)
Placeholders for sample indexes (to follow after discussion)
Extracts from sample indexes