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We want you to get the best out of your Archive CD Books experience but if you have a question please look here BEFORE contacting us. You’ll get your answer quickly and we can spend more time finding new and exciting books for you.

 

Book Indexes

Q4.1: Do books have Indexes?

The short answer is that some books do have indexes, and some don't.

The book does have an index

Where the book has an index, then that makes the CD very easy to use indeed. The book's index pages are "bookmarked" for you in Acrobat Reader. Clicking on the link in the pane on the left side of the screen takes you to the index pages.
Wherever possible, we make the real book's page numbering match Acrobat Reader's page numbering. Look in the book's index to find what you want, and make a note of the page number. Now you can use the mouse to grab the vertical scroll bar on the right hand side of your screen and drag it up or down, and as you do so, the page numbers are displayed. Just let go the mouse button on the page that you wanted to go to.... and it is there.

Where the book does not have an index

If this is the case, then we are stuck with reading the book like a real book. Actually this is much more enjoyable, as you will find that you spot all sorts of other interesting things as you work through it. Things that you didn't expect to find.
Some CDs do use Adobe Acrobat Reader's "find" feature so that you can search for a word, place name or person's name. Some CDs don't have that because the old book just wasn't good enough to make “machine reading” of the book successful enough. (Even those that do incorporate the find feature don't always find everything! - at best some are only 25% successful - so don't rely on it). If the description of the book on the on-line catalogue says "excellent search facility in Acrobat Reader", then it will be 90% or better.
What we do include on all of our CDs produced after December 2000, however, are very comprehensive "bookmarks". This is like using a detailed contents page in a book, and it works very well to take you to the relevant section.

Q4.2: Some CDs have a link to download indexes but it doesn't work.
On some of our very early CD books we started a scheme whereby volunteers began indexing whole books, each of them doing a small part. It worked well while it lasted, but unfortunately that scheme didn't continue.
In fact on some early CDs we even included a link to a web page where you could download a completed book index. Those indexes available for download are in fact still there, but what they don't do (as stated in some CDs) is automatically link in "live" with the CD. They are stand-alone indexes in text format. Unfortunately many book indexes never got completed, and since we moved on to a different type of CD format (PDF files for Acrobat Reader) the book indexing projects by volunteers was dropped.
Actually, that is a pity, as Rod would like to see book indexing take off again as there is no substitute for good human indexing. Something that a computer program can never do that well with these old books. Unfortunately, we are all so busy scanning books and making new CDs available that we no longer even have the time to coordinate book indexing projects. If someone was to volunteer to be that coordinator then Rod would be a very happy person! [hint].