Notes1. Reed Elsevier’s website may be found at www.reed-

elsevier.com2. Taylor and Francis’ website may be found at www.tandf.co.uk3. Public Library of Science’s website may be found at

www.publiclibraryofscience.org4. American Research Library’s website may be found at

www.arl.org5. For an overview see Marcell and Newton (1994).

ReferencesBergstrom, T. C. (2001) Free labor for costly journals. Journal of

Economic Perspectives 15(4), 83–98.Bower, T. (1992) Maxwell: the outsider. New York: Viking.Case, M. M. (2001) The impact of serial costs on library collec-

tions. ARL Bimonthly Report 218.Cox, B. (2002) The Pergamon phenomenon 1951–1991: Robert

Maxwell and scientific publishing. Learned Publishing 15(4),273–8.

Crow, R. (2002) The case for institutional repositories: a SPARCposition paper. Washington, DC: SPARC.

Davies, N. (1992) The unknown Maxwell: his astonishing secretlives revealed by his aide and close companion. London:Sidgwick and Jackson.

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Kyrillidou, M. and Young, M. (2002) Research library trends: anintroduction. American Research Libraries. Available at:http://www.arl.org.stats/arlstat/01pub/intro.html

Marcella, R. and Newton, R. (1994) A new manual of classifica-tion. Aldershot: Gower.

McSherry, C. (2001) Who owns academic work? Battling forcontrol of intellectual property. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press

Merrett, C. (2001) Mounting the barricades of intellectualfreedom in defence of libraries. Innovation 23, 48–9.

Naylor, B. (2002) Just a minute. Library and Information Update1(3), 18.

Office of Fair Trading (2002) The market for STM journals. (OFTreport 396).

Rosenzweig, M. L. (1999) Reclaiming what we own: expandingcompetition in scholarly publishing. Plenary address to theNinth Conference of the Association of College and ResearchLibraries, Detroit.

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Christopher Merrett is Director of Administration at theUniversity of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Email:merrett@nu.ac.za

The Indexer Vol. 23 No. 4 October 2003 215

Bell: Also-greats

Also-greatsHazel K. Bell

I ended my article in the last Indexer issue on ‘The greatestand the worst indexes’ (these being assessed entirely bypraise or scorn that had been expressed in The Indexer) byasking for comments, votes and further suggestions on thoseselections. I have received two letters suggesting othercontenders for the ‘greatest’ category.

Peter Rooney, whose original idea the list was, advocatesDialogues of Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett, firstpublished by Macmillan in 1892, then by Oxford in 1920, andRandom House in 1937. The last-mentioned edition has1618 pages, of which the index occupies 116. The style is run-on; subentries are arranged in order of essay as printed inthe two-volume translation. The page references appear as‘Protag. 326C’, with the pages divided into sections A, B, C,D, and E from top to bottom.

Rooney supplies an example (without page references):

Writingthe art of, taught in schools (Protagoras)invented by Theuth (Phaedrus)injurious to the memory; (ibid)written compositions apt to be unintelligible;require the aid of dialectic;ought to have a serious purpose;inferior to the thoughts and aspirations of the soul;the ‘writing of our minds’ (Philebus)

The passages in Phaedrus recite the common claim of theancients that the invention of writing has led to the deterio-ration of people’s memories and their power of thought:Homer’s epics were originally recited from memory. Like-wise, Socrates never wrote any essays; they were recorded orinvented by Plato. The Chinese are said to reject indexes fora similar reason.

Another correspondent points out that Hans Wellisch’sown extensive index to his book The conversion of scripts – itsnature, history, and utilization (Wiley, 1978; xviii, 509 pp) hasname indexes in Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean,Chinese and Japanese, in addition to the Roman (orRomanized) names included in the general index of namesand subjects. For this index, Wellisch received the firstH. W. Wilson Indexing Award, in 1979, with the citation:‘the index was specially commended for its clarity, precision,and appropriateness in both its intellectual content and itstypographic form’.

Hazel K. Bell is a freelance indexer and was editor of The Indexerfrom 1978 to 1995. Email: hkbell@dial.pipex.com