Matteo Romanello (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)
Simone Finkmann (University of Rostock)
Indices (e.g. locorum, nominum, rerum) facilitate the readers' orientation within a printed publication and help them find the information they are looking for. While the transition to digitalpublishing does not render indices less useful, it does require us to find an adequate adaptation of such indices for a digital publishing environment. What should an index of a digital scholarly publication look like? As argued by McGuire (2013), the natural translation of a printed index in a digital environment is an API (Application Programming Interface) — i.e. a machine-friendly interface aimed at enabling the programmatic access to content published on the Web — and the job of “good publishers of the future” is to provide APIs for their publications.