Needs for research in indexing

In recent years, the amount of research in indexing appears to have decreased, despite the continued need for improvement in both quality and cost-effectiveness of indexing. The primary purpose of any index is to permit users to locate information; this implies both a need for research into user needs per se, and a requirement that any research be oriented toward the goal of meeting those needs. Cognitive processes of both indexers and index users need study; the former appear not to have been explicitly addressed in the literature. Issues of vocabulary control—the extent of control, or even whether it should be used at all—continue to present problems, despite the continued development of tools intended to aid in such control. Increased computer power has made it possible to relegate to the computer more of the tasks formerly carried out by humans. The need to determine how best to supplement human intellectual effort with computer capabilities has become urgent. Structure and layout of indexes, both on the printed page and on computer screens, remain primarily a matter of folklore and intuition, despite the existence of some research on the topic. Finally, more research on evaluation of indexes is required, to assure that all other efforts contribute to actual usability of the final product.