Periodical Indexing Services

• Creating indexes for periodicals (magazines, journals, newsletters, newspapers, weeklies, meeting minutes)
• Developing index specifications and/or guidelines for a particular project or your ongoing in-house needs
• Developing controlled vocabularies (e.g. name and subject authority lists) for a particular project or your ongoing in-house needs

Factors Affecting Periodical Indexes

• Complexity of material (general, scholarly, technical)
• If specifications and guidelines are already in place
• Number of indexes necessary (combined or separate subject and title/author indexes)
• Time span covered (retrospective project covering several years of a title never indexed or just starting with a recent issue)
• Print quality of the material (older material)

Controlled Vocabularies

Vocabulary control is essential to periodical indexing particularly for indexes still in publication or when indexing a span of several years and terminology has changed.

Your in-house or already published controlled vocabularies (name and subject authorities, thesauri) can be used or adapted for your project. The Library of Congress Authorities and the United Nations Bibliographic Information Service provide examples of controlled vocabularies available online.

Guidelines and Specifications

Guidelines help determine what will be indexed, e.g. articles with bylines only, what will not be indexed, e.g. advertisments, dated material such as meeting announcements, and how other material, e.g. letters to the editor, book reviews, or other unique features will be handled.

In addition to the specifications for books indexes, periodicals have additional considerations such as:

• Depth: includes the level of exhaustivity and specificity; indexing at the article level is less exhaustive than indexing at the paragraph level; the heading civil rights movement is more specific than social movements
  
• Subheading format: subject only, title of article or column, type (e.g. column or letter to the editor)
  
• Page number format: how volume and issue numbers and dates will be represented