The ASI/H.W. Wilson Company Indexing Award was established in 1978 to honor excellence in indexing of an English language monograph or other non-serial work published in the United States during the previous calendar year. Its purpose is two-fold: for indexers, to provide and publicize models of excellence in indexing; for publishers, to encourage greater recognition of the importance of quality in book indexing.

The award consists of two parts: a citation and $1000 for the indexer, and a citation for the publisher. Should no index suitable for the Wilson Award be submitted, ASI reserves the right to withhold the award.

The judges are especially interested in seeing books of unusual or difficult subject matter, well-typeset, whose indexers faced unusual challenges they addressed creatively and with high standards of index quality. ASI/Wilson Award books serve as models for the profession.

See the submission guidelines and nomination form for details or send email to Wilsonaward@asindexing.org for eligibility questions.

• Criteria for the Award
• Award Judging Process
• Recipients of the H. W. Wilson Award

Criteria for the H. W. Wilson Award

SUBSTANCE

Elegance
Succinctness; the right word in the right place—even if the word isn’t found in the text; “a certain charm”; visual appeal; a sense that the index contains exactly what it needs to, no more, no less; simplicity; grace. Elegance is the quality that makes an exceptional index more than the sum of its parts.

Usability

• Does the index appropriately anticipate the needs of its users?
• Are the significant concepts indexed?
• Are there appropriate alternative terms for accessing concepts?
• Are special treatments such as italics and boldface appropriate to the complexity of the material and the needs of the user?
• Is there a headnote explaining special treatments?
• Does the format provide for ease in visually scanning the index?
• Is the phrasing of entries and subentries clear, with significant terms first and no unnecessary prepositions?

Coverage

• Does the index cover the ground? Does it do so in an evenhanded fashion?
• Look up a few important topics to see if coverage is adequate.
• The index should go beyond listing the main headings in each chapter or rearranging the table of contents.
• Significant concepts should be indexed, and scattered discussions of a concept should be brought together.
• Irrelevant information, such as scene-setting material or passing mentions, should not be indexed.
• There should be no apparent indexer bias.

Analysis

• Are main entries analyzed appropriately into subentries?
• Are subentries overanalyzed so that the same page numbers are repeated again and again in close proximity to one another?
• Are there strings of undifferentiated locators at an entry?
• Are the number and level of subentries appropriate to the complexity of the book?

Access

• Is there more than one access point to significant concepts?
• The index should use the author’s vocabulary but should also provide alternative terms and cross-references that will give the reader access.
• Entries should be “flipped” where necessary or appropriate.

Cross-referencing

• Are cross-references adequate and useful?
• See also references should send readers to appropriate related material. (Double-posting is preferable to See references that send the reader to an entry with very few page references.)

MECHANICS

Accuracy

• There should be no misspellings or typos, no odd page ranges or references out of order.
• Alphabetization of main entries, subentries, and cross-references should be correct.
• Punctuation should be correct.
• Forms of names and terms should be correct and appropriate to the field of specialization.
• Cross-references should neither be circular nor point to missing or differently worded entries.
• “Flipped” entries should have the same page references at both locations in the index.

Style

• Is the style consistent throughout?
• Does the style effectively resolve challenges presented by the text?
• Look at such style points as sorting order, punctuation of cross-references, leading and separator punctuation of locators, abbreviation of inclusive ranges, positioning of cross-references, run-in. vs. indented subentries, capitalization of main entries, use of alternative typefaces.

[The descriptive categories included here are freely adapted from Carolyn McGovern's “How to Evaluate Indexes.” KEY WORDS 1, no. 9 (Nov/Dec 1993) pp. 1,21.]

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The H. W. Wilson Award Judging Process

Panel of Judges

The ASI President, in consultation with the previous Wilson Award Committee Chair, designates the Wilson Award Committee Chair. Hosting of the judging rotates from year to year among chapters.

The Committee Chair selects committee members. Appointments are generally for one year; but, to ensure continuity, the past and incoming chairs of the Committee are also invited to serve. The ASI President is a member of the panel, ex officio. The remaining three or four judges are selected from the local chapter. All judges must be members of the American Society for Indexing.

The members of the Committee are chosen to represent a range of subject areas and indexing expertise. Non-voting consultants may be asked to participate in deliberations if a specialized index is under consideration and the judges need specialized expert advice.

The chair also appoints a registrar, whose job it is to receive the submitted books and check that eligibility requirements are met. The registrar also covers any references to the indexer’s name, so that judging can be anonymous.

Judging

Judging is usually held on a single day about two months before the ASI annual conference.

Each book is evaluated by at least three judges using the Wilson Award criteria. Indexes which stand out as possible winners are then thoroughly evaluated and discussed by the entire panel of judges. Decisions of the Committee are generally made by consensus, and the discussion is confidential.

No indexes prepared by members of the Committee can be considered during their term of service on the panel. Judges who have knowledge of the indexer of a particular book or have another conflict of interest must disqualify themselves from judging that book.

After judging, the winner is notified as soon as possible and letters of appreciation are sent to all submitters. Public announcement of the winner is made at the annual ASI conference.

Books submitted for the award are returned promptly after judging, except for the award-winning book, which is displayed at the Annual Conference and returned to the submitter afterward.

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Recipients of the H. W. Wilson Award

NOTE: Sample pages from selected award-winning indexes can be downloaded as PDF files from the highlighted title links below. Sample indexes are published with permission of the copyright owners as an educational service to the industry. PDFs can be rotated within Acrobat.

2008 Margie Towery for her index to The History of Cartography, volume three: Cartography in the European Renaissance, parts 1 and 2, edited by David Woodward and published by the University of Chicago Press. Sixty-four expert scholars contributed to this volume, which traces connections with medieval mapmaking as well as the development of new technologies in the Renaissance era. Towery's task was to bring together related ideas from the text, often expressed in different ways by different authors, as well as to provide access to details on specific persons, places, and technologies from the period. The Wilson Award Committee noted the completeness of the index and particularly praised her precise yet evocative choice of wording that draws readers in and encourages them to look up the references in the text. The index not only stands as a model and inspiration for indexers, but is a pleasure to read.

2007 Do Mi Stauber for her index to The Self-Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization, by Frederick M. Smith, published by Columbia University Press in 2006. Based on years of intensive research, Frederick Smith analyzes Indic literature from all time periods and over a hundred ethnographies, identifying several forms of possession. Kay Banning, speaking for the 2007 Wilson Award Committee, commented that Do Mi Stauber’s index to Frederick Smith’s complex work has a strong conceptual base, with well-developed headings and a solid network of cross references. The thoughtfully phrased subheadings have a narrative flow, appropriate for the run-in style of the index.

2006 Charlee Trantino for her index to A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, published as a new edition by the New World Library. When the stream-of-consciousness style Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, critics called it "unintelligible." Others such as Joseph Campbell wanted to figure it out. Working with the poet Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key was the first guide to Joyce's masterwork. It solved many of the puzzles Joyce presents, but earlier editions had no index. The elegance of the index, its appropriateness for the work and for its scholarly audience is what makes it an exemplar.

2005 Award not given.

2004 Janet Russell for her index to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition, 2002 Revision (2003 Update). T he Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) are "designed for use in the construction of catalogs and other lists in general libraries of all sizes. The rules cover the description of, and the provision of access points for, all library materials commonly collected at the present time." The rules are published jointly by The American Library Association, The Canadian Library Association and CILIP: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (London). Speaking for the committee, Janet Perlman commented that, "The Wilson jury felt that the index exhibited excellence in its accuracy, completeness, and ease of use. The index had a level of complexity matching that of the document, and the indexer's use of the text's language reflected good indexing practice and anticipated the needs of its primary users: cataloguers."

2003 Award not given.

2002 Margie Towery for her cumulative index to The Letters of Matthew Arnold, a six-volume collection of letters of the well-known nineteenth-century British poet and critic, published by the University Press of Virginia. Ms. Towery's index appears in volume 6 of the series. The committee was impressed by the thoroughness of the index and its consequent usefulness to the scholars who are its primary audience. Towery's painstaking approach can be seen in the very precise page ranges given for each letter and the lists of "mentioneds," the concise but elegant distinctions made between people with the same name, and the brief but clear analysis of the entries. The relevance and parallelism of the subheadings and the grammatical relationship between the subheads and the main headings are also outstanding. "The language," as committee member Laura Gottlieb put it, "is lovely." All in all, the committee felt that this index not only provides excellent access to Matthew Arnold's letters, but stands as a shining example for anyone undertaking a similar project in the future.

2001 Ronald M. Gephart and Paul H. Smith for their cumulative index to Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, published by the Library of Congress last year. The Letters project began in 1970, produced twenty-five volumes containing the 23,000 letters of the first delegates to Congress, and was completed in 2000 with the publication of the cumulative index in volume 26. The Wilson Award judging committee found that the cumulative index provides narrative analysis for the letters and makes the letters and history within accessible. As one judge said, "The index is the narrative." In a recent review, the Letters of Delegates to Congress were described as "one of the most noteworthy and useful series to have appeared in the past 100 years of historical editing and publishing in America." The index makes it so.

2000 Nedalina Dineva for the index to Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy by Max Jammer. Published by Princeton University Press. The winning index is described as "an elegant index to a complex subject" by Dr. Bella Hass Weinberg, a member of the judging committee.

1999 Richard Genova for Brownfields Law and Practice by Michael B. Gerrard, published by Matthew Bender & Co., Inc. In her praise of Mr. Genova's work, Colleen Dunham, chair of the 1999 Wilson Award committee, noted that Genova's index met a three-pronged challenge of (1) bringing readers to the new vocabulary of a new frontier in environmental law, (2) charting an easy map to the large and immensely complicated text of Brownfields, and (3) addressing the novice, as well as the sophisticated, brownfields researcher.

1998 Laura Moss Gottlieb for Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment by Michael A. Mello, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Do Mi Stauber, chair of the 1998 Wilson Award committee, praised Gottlieb's indexing of Dead Wrong: "The winning index must be accurate and useful to the reader, but it must also be unusually elegant in its style and its synthesis of the information in the text. Laura Gottlieb's index meets all of these criteria. ... A book with this kind of narrative structure, especially one with the large amount of information about the legal system and about specific cases found in this text, is extremely difficult to index and needs an unusual amount of analysis. Laura Gottlieb has gracefully extracted the conceptual material from this narrative and made it accessible to the reader in a coherent index structure."

1997 Gillian Northcott and Ruth Levitt for Dictionary of Art, edited by Joan Shoaf Turner and published by Grove's Dictionaries in the United States and Macmillan Publishers Ltd. in the United Kingdom. The Dictionary of Art is made up of 32 volumes. This marks the first time that the Wilson Award has been presented for a multi-volume work. The index, which took 10 years to compile, comprised one volume of the dictionary.

1996 Award not given.

1995 Martin L. White for the index to The Promise of Pragmatism by John Patrick Diggins. Published by University of Chicago Press

1994 Patricia Deminna for Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture by Daniel Boyarin. Published by University of California Press

1993 Award not given.

1992 Rachel Jo Johnson for The American Law of Real Property by Arthur Gaudio. Published by Matthew Bender.

1991 Nancy L. Daniels for Beyond Public Architecture: Strategies for Design Evaluation by Hamid Shirvani. Published by Van Nostrand Reinhold.

1990 Marcia Carlson for Strategic Nuclear Arms & Arms Control Debates by Lynn Eden and Steven Miller. Published by Cornell University Press.

1989 Philip James for Medicine for the Practicing Physician, 2nd ed.. by John Willis Hurst. Published by Butterworths.

1988 Jeanne Moody for Raptor Management Techniques by Beth A. Giron Pendleton. Published by National Wildlife Institute.

1987 Award not given.

1986 Marjorie Hyslop for Metals Handbook Comprehensive Index by American Society for Metals. Published by American Society for Metals.

1985 Sydney W. Cohen for The Experts Speak by Cerf and Navasky. Published by Random House.

1984 Trish Yancey for Index and Directory of U.S. Industry Standards Published by Information Handling Services.

1983 Award not given.

1982 Catherine Fix for Diagnosis of Bone and Joint Disorders by Donald Resnick. Published by Wm. Saunders Company.

1981 Delight Ansley for Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Published by Random House.

1980 Linda I. Solow for Beyond Orpheus: Studies in Musical Structures by David Epstein. Published by M. I. T. Press.

1979 Hans H. Wellisch for The Conversion of Scripts: Its Nature, History and Utilization by Hans H. Wellisch. Published by John Wiley

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