Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Indexing

Just a thought. There are some important books out there which deserve good indices. The prime example, which has frustrated me innumerable times, is Daniel Sperber's seven-volume book, Minhagei Yisrael. There is a huge amount of information there. Much of it appears as BTW footnotes in random places, or scattered in the addenda to the later volumes. It takes ages to find what I want, and I'm never sure there isn't some crucial passage hiding somewhere I didn't notice.

If Sperber intends to publish additional volumes, and I certainly hope he does, perhaps a good way of keeping the index up-to-date would be online. This worked well for another book that kept coming out in clumps.

By the way, a slightly edited version of one of my postings is now on Jewschool.

2 Comments:

Blogger manuscriptboy said...

I know, I indexed a book manually this past summer. I thought my hands were going to fall off.

10:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I really appreciate people like you who take their chance in such an excellent way to give an impression on certain topics. Thanks for having me here.

10:15 PM  

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