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	This article first appeared in SIGGNL 20 pages 15 to 18

	The Complete Peerage: Indexes versus CD-ROMs Peter Hammond
	For the past ten years I have been engaged in compiling and editing the latest volume of The Complete Peerage, the fourteenth in the series. Like the rest of the series it does not have an index of the whole contents, since the main sequence is in alphabetical order of title of peers. This makes it simple and easy to look up the entry for a particular peer, and it was argued in the past that the volumes did not need an index for this reason. However the original plan of the Complete Peerage Trust, which published most of the volumes, was to publish an Index volume when the main sequence was complete. This decision was sensible because each entry in every volume contains many personal names - relations of the peer being treated and non-relatives - and also names of places.
	The intention to publish an index was abandoned when the Trust was wound up in 1960, following the publication of the last volume in the alphabetical sequence. As my own work on volume 14 came to an end, I considered the possibility of reviving this project. In terms of sheer size alone, this was a daunting task: there are, very roughly, 13,000 pages in the set. Each page contains many names and (in some cases) concepts that needed to be indexed. A pilot scheme to check the feasibility of the project was set up, and two people indexed a number of pages chosen at random from one of the volumes, using guidelines which I had drawn up from a number of pages I had indexed myself. It was found that no matter how carefully the guidelines were written and revised, problems arose as to what needed indexing. The peerage is a complicated subject, and many rules are needed to deal with, for example, titles such as Grey of Warke ('of Warke' being part of the title) and Grey (of Shirland): the title here is Grey, but 'of Shirland' is needed to distinguish this title from, for example, Grey (of Ruthin). This kind of problem complicated the indexing; others just meant that the process would take much longer than at first estimated. Thus families changing their names several times (a fairly frequent occurrence in noble families) necessitated more cross references than might have been thought necessary, ie there would be a sequence:- Hastings Hastings, see also Rawdon-Hastings and Abney-Hastings Rawdon-Hastings, see also etc Abney-Hastings, see also etc. The same could occur with titles, since most peers of degree above a Baron have several titles, and cross references in many cases would be neccesary to each, thus:- Haverfordwest, i.e. Barony of Tyrone of Haverfordwest, see Beresford, Marquesses of Waterford Tyrone of Haverfordwest, Barony of, see Beresford, Marquesses of Waterford. There would also need to be the main entry:- Beresford, George de la Poer, Marquess of Waterford. Some peers have up to a dozen titles, and these may need cross referencing to more than one family. They, or their widow, may also marry several times.
Pilot scheme	The pilot scheme showed that these and other complications meant not only that indexers needed knowledge of the peerage and genealogy to be able to sort them out, but that one page could take anything up to 20 minutes to index, in total something over 4000 hours of indexing. At this point it became evident that a conventional index was going to take more time, and above all cost more money than was likely to be forthcoming.
Opportunities provided by CD-ROM technology	It seemed a tragedy just to abandon the idea of an index; The Complete Peerage is one of those essential works which are useful now but could be so much more useful if opened up with an index. Having just started to use the Dictionary of National Biography and the OED on CD-ROM, it struck me that this might be a feasible way out. Large reference works have only just begun to appear in this form and they are still not very common, partly perhaps because they cost too much for most private users. However, as many of you will know, this form of publication does make a book much more usable than before - and indeed in the case of Palmers Index to The Times makes it properly usable for the first time! In effect a book on CD-ROM has every word indexed and the software allows a search for any word or concept, using wild cards’ for variant spellings. In the case of The Complete Peerage, this would remove the need for such care in indexing complicated concepts of peerage law, because a user who wished to know such things would know how they had been described, they would have direct access. Since searching on combinations of words is possible it would thus be possible for a user to find out for the first time such facts as how many peers had lived at a particular time or place or how many had been created in a particular year. These are facts impossible to discover in any other way. The above is what is allowed by the various types of software used by all publishers. In addition each book issued on CD-ROM allows different kinds of special searches, depending on what the the book is. A CD-ROM of The Complete Peerage would need to allow searches on, for example, peerage titles (for peers occurring in entries not their own) and personal names. Entry of a title for example, perhaps "Salisbury, Earldom", would take the user to a scrolling type of display and a simple click’ on Salisbury would take you straight into the entry (or the first of the entries) found. It would also be useful to be able to find lists of books referred to, and here variations of citations over the the 90 years of publication would have to be catered for, and perhaps authors of articles - where known, because none are signed. For this to be possible it would be necessary to flag these points when the database was being compiled.
Challenges	The compilation of the database’ is the main hurdle to be overcome before it is possible to access these wonders. Scanning is not yet reliable enough: scanning a page of the CP yields a wonderfully odd text, due to the complicated layout of the page, although this will doubtless improve in the future. For a book of this nature and size it is at the moment cheaper and quicker to have the whole thing typed, usually in the Far East, where costs are lower. Flagging, editing and incorporating changes would then have to be done. These processes are not cheap, and it remains to be seen if they are cheap enough to allow them to take place. Certainly orthodox indexing is in no danger of being made out of date by this process.


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