INDEXING HISTORY Classifying, categorizing and organizing information seems to be a basic human activity. Flowing from this is the need to retrieve information using those skills. Indexing is the basic mode of doing this. The core of an index is using a known set of symbols, such as the alphabet. Book index is indeed the oldest among the figurative or applied senses of the word, and that this specific usage (like the word itself) goes back to ancient Rome. There, when used in relation to literary works, the term index was used for the little slip attached to papyrus scrolls on which the title of the work (and sometimes also the name of the author) was written so that each scroll on the shelves could be easily identified without having to pull them out for inspection. So that the copyists may take some bits of parchment to make title slips from them. From this developed the usage of index for the title of books. Finding the actual first index seems to be a difficul...
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