Vancouver: Art & Artists 1931 - 1983 was an exhibition catalogue produced by the Vancouver Art Gallery on the occasion of the opening of their "new" premises in the old Courthouse building on West Georgia Street in 1983. It was the first historical art information relevant to Vancouver that I located at the start of my original research project Looking For Maud, a biographical search for the artist Maud Rees Sherman.

The catalogue is a thick book of 440 pages, densely packed full of information about early art and artists in Vancouver, as seen through the lens of the Vancouver Art Gallery from its original opening in 1931 until the re-opening in 1983. It is an excellent reference book, with only one teensy little shortcoming - it has no index. There is a Table of Contents, listing over 23 chapters by different authors; four chronologies; a list of works in the exhibition; artists' biographies; and an extensive list of credits for photographs appearing in the catalogue. But no index.

A Table of Contents typically lists chapters or essays. These are big, generalized containers holding a wide variety of information, grouped together thematically, chronologically, or simply for convenience. On the other hand, an index entry is a precise, almost surgical, tool for quickly finding a specific piece of information. The more comprehensive the index is, the more accurate the results will be, with less time spent doing the search. To a researcher, this is critical.

And so, tired of flipping through Vancouver: Art & Artists 1931 - 1983 over and over, sticking Post-its on numerous pages, with apocryphal memos to myself, to be able to remember where the information was, I eventually decided to create my own index to the catalogue. An index, as it turned out, is a difficult thing to create. Entire careers can be built around indexing.

Along the way I acquired a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, which contained extensive information on how to index. There are a number of ways to index, it turns out. Of course, I had my own preference, for a somewhat narrative style of index. Yes, it is nice to have a listing that gives information such as:
    Weston, W.P.; 38, 54, 78, 96-105,127, 338.
But what does that tell you? You have six "hits" for Weston, but no idea what they mean, and you have to look up every entry to find out what the reference is. I would rather see a more long-winded index, using the above example:
     Weston, William Perceval; born, 38; moves to B.C., 53; exhibits with BCSFA, 78; teaching, 96-105; CGP, 127; Shadows, Grouse Mountain, 338.

The latter entry, I thought, indicating a reproduction of a painting, was particularly relevant to an article about an artist. And so, using a format like this, I began. It was only for my own use anyway, right?