Online Cross-Referencing Whats the best way to handle cross references in online indexes?
In my opinion, see references can be entirely dropped from online indexes and replaced with multiple posts. That is, instead of putting all entries under “higher education” and creating the cross reference “universities. See higher education,” I say you should put everything under everything. To make this work, however, you’ll often need to rewrite your labels. Where “universities” was fine for the cross reference, the new entry should be “universities and colleges,” or “universities and other higher education.” And so on. My reasoning is that online text is cheap (although screen real estate often isn’t), and that there’s little point in bouncing a person from one place to another. See references, in print, are useful for only two reasons: to save space (not relevant online) and to control vocabulary (which can be accomplished with longer labels). Consequently, see references aren’t needed. See-also references, in my opinion, also aren’t needed. At least, not in the index. In a printe
