In addition to books, I will undertake commissions to index web sites, serial publications and company and society documentation, such as catalogues, meeting minutes, etc.

I am a member of the Society of Indexers, and an accredted indexer, having successfully completed the Society's accreditation process. I use professional indexing software, and can supply the index in any format required. I am also open to producing indexes in other ways, for example by embedding codes in the original text. 

The presence of a index will improve sales of a book. Many librarians, especially in academic libraries, will refuse to purchase books that do not have an index. Individual buyers also frequently make a decision to purchase after leafing through the index to obtain an overview of the coverage. The importance of the index is emphasized by the decision of Amazon.com to feature it among the sample pages presented for a book.

The added value of human input, described below, means that an index is a useful feature even where full text searching is possible, eg on a web site or in an e-text.

Rates depend on the complexity of the text. Please contact me for a quotation.

So far, I have indexed books on human and veterinary medicine, tourism, forestry, waste management, genetics and agriculture:

Forest History: International Studies on Socioeconomic and Forest Ecosystem Change
IUFRO Research Series, No. 2
edited by M Agnoletti and S Anderson,
432 pages, ISBN: 0851994199, CABI 2000

 Waste composting for urban and peri-urban agriculture: Closing the rural-urban nutrient cycle in sub-Saharan Africa.
edited by P Drechsel and D Kunze
250 pages  ISBN 0 85199 5489, CABI/FAO 2001

Managing Plant Genetic Diversity
edited by J Engels, V R Rao, A H D Brown and M T Jackson
512 pages, ISBN: 0851995225, CABI 2001

Market Development for Genetically Modified Foods
edited by V Santaniello, R E Evenson, and D Zilberman
336 pages, ISBN: 085199573X, CABI 2002

Crop-Soil Simulation Models : Applications in Developing Countries
edited by R Matthews and W Stephens
269 pages, ISBN 0851995632, CABI 2002

The tourist as a metaphor of the social world
edited by GMS Dann
339 pages, ISBN 085199606X, CABI 2002

Macrocyclic Lactones in Antiparasitic Therapy
edited by J. Vercruysse and RS Rew
350 pages, ISBN 0-85-199617-5, CABI 2002

Ecotourism programme planning
by DA Fennell
250 pages, ISBN: 0-85199-610-8, CABI 2002

Forest policy for private forestry
edited by L Teeter, B Cahore and D Zhang
300 pages, ISBN 0-85199-599-3, CABI 2003

Disease-related Malnutrition
edited by R J Stratton and M Elia
848 pages, ISBN: 0851996485, CABI 2003

Poultry Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology
edited by W M Muir and S E Aggrey
744 pages, ISBN: 0851996604, CABI 2003

Biological Control in IPM Systems in Africa
edited by P. Neuschwander, C. Borgemeister and J. Langewald
448 pages, ISBN: 0851996396, CABI 2003

Agriculture and International Trade: Law, Policy and the WTO
edited by M N Cardwell, C Rodgers, and M R Grossman
352 pages, ISBN: 0851996639, CABI 2003

A human-generated index is superior to a machine-generated concordance or to a full-text search facility because:

• a human indexer is more likely to recognize relevance. For example, a human indexer will not index a passage containing a reference to "the milk of human kindness" under "dairy products", but some machine indexers might do just that;

• a human indexer can recognize not only synonyms (words with the same meanings), for which one preferred term must be selected, but also homonyms (words that look the same but have different meanings), which must be distinguished in the index references. Moreover, a human indexer will recognize concepts that are implicit in the text, but are not actually stated in words.