This British Standard makes recommendations on the content, organization and presentation of indexes. It applies to indexes of books, periodicals, reports and other documents in any medium, such as films, sound recordings, diagrams, maps and three-dimensional objects. It is relevant to all such indexes, whether manually produced or computer-assisted, and whether compiled by one indexer or several indexers.

It covers the choice, form and arrangement of headings and subheadings used in index entries, and assigned keywords, once the subjects to be indexed have been determined. (For the examination of documents and the selection of subjects for indexing see BS 6529. For the compilation of a monolingual thesaurus that may assist in the selection of index terms see BS 5723.)

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