Kim Harris LLB (Hons); DipLib; MSocInd(Adv)
I am a legally qualified, accredited and expert indexer of law and other books, with 29 years' experience, and have indexed over 3500 pieces of work. I am therefore able to add in-depth subject knowledge to my experience as a qualified indexer, law librarian and legal researcher. I have been involved with legal information for over 30 years.
I aim to provide user-friendly indexes which enable direct access to information as quickly as possible, whilst also providing comprehensive coverage. Please see 'Work and Working Methods' for details of my style and how my indexes look.
I worked for nine years organising legal information and conducting research for two leading international City law firms, Holman Fenwick Willan and Simmons & Simmons, where I learnt what practitioners need from indexes and how to work under pressure.
I specialise in law books but I also have wide experience of creating indexes in other subject areas such as politics, sociology, business, religion and international relations. My rates are very competitive and compare favourably with those recommended by the Society of Indexers.
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Professor Campbell McLachlan QC:
We were impressed by the quality of your index for the first edition. Reviewers of that edition were uniformly complimentary about the quality of the tables and index. We felt that the approach that you the adopted, which was to prepare an intelligent thematic index, grouping the issues in the book by subject-matter in ways that did not merely duplicate the information in the detailed table of contents or the tables of cases and treaties, was very satisfactory. It added to the utility of the volume, and thus to its success as the leading single volume treatise on this important and developing area of the law. We are deeply conscious of the fact that the preparation of a good index is an art and not merely a matter of computer-generated key words.
It was for these reasons that we insisted that, if at all possible, the Press should retain you again to index the second edition.
We hold Ms Harris in high regard as an expert indexer. We consider that she has done an equally good job on the Second Edition as she did on the First. The Index is both intelligent and intuitive - a far cry from that which could have been produced by computer-generated key words.
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Robert Dalton (Senior Advisor on Treaty Practice at the U.S. Department of State):
The user-friendly index should markedly enhance the ability of a researcher to pinpoint quickly the location of related information elsewhere in the Commentary and to access that material by eliminating the need to check for additional sources at the beginning of his or her research.
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Dame Rosalyn Higgins (former President of the International Court of Justice):
We are most grateful for the enormous and caring work of the Indexer.
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Prof. em. Dr.iur. Christoph Schreuer and Prof. Dr. Ursula Kriebaum:
We have recently received the index produced by you to our book Principles of International Investment Law and wish to thank you personally for your excellent work. The erudition and detail of this index is a most important contribution to the overall quality of this volume. We very much hope to be able to work with you on future projects.
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Please see 'testimonials' page for other comments.
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'To index a book you need to understand it – to recognise terms of art, to follow the structure of an argument, to know when a large arc of text follows a single topic and where synonyms flock together usefully or otherwise...It takes a human to think about what a reader needs from a book, to recognise a theme, to think about the difference between a passing reference and a key passage. Indexing is a work of interpretation: it is, however humble in the service of its object text, a work of intellectual scrutiny.' Sam Leith.
Five things indexers wish authors knew.