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I've indexed a few books myself and agree that it is quite daunting, but it does get easier the more books you do.  The process you describe is similar to the process I use to index books - I break the book into manageable chunks (chapters if it has them or batches of 10 recipes at a time) and I then enter the title and page number for each recipe in that batch, go back and read the recipe in detail and decide on recipe type, course and nutrition (adding notes in the Indexer notes field if I'm really unsure about any of that) and then finally I add the ingredients and any notes.  Then I recheck the section before moving on.  I think it's so much easier than trying to do everything for each individual recipe and having to flick between the store-cupboard ingredients list and the recipe type list.

However, I think it would be very complicated and impractical for Eat Your Books to manage a process where you could index some bits and not others (or have more than one member index certain parts of a book) and, as someone who uses the site virtually every day to search for recipes, I'd be quite irritated to find that, say, only titles and page numbers had been indexed!  I may be in the minority though!

It sounds great but I'm not sure how practical it would be.  Everyone in the chain would need access to a copy of the cookbook as a list of ingredients doesn't always convey all the information needed to know what region a dish best matches, if its truely vegetarian or vegan.  I do think the template could be improved to help the process, adding hover tips over ingredients. If I enter butter and don't recall it needs to be at least 1 stick to list I could key it, hover over to see the tip that says at least 1 stick and know if it should stay or I can quickly X it to delete and move on instead of having to load the other page, search for the ingredient, etc  Not being the one who has to take care of the coding that might be far more of a headache than its worth however  :D 

I have to second that I'd rather not see partial books. Keying them in order I'd have a lot of appetiser and soup recipes were that the case.

I'm kind of the opposite of everyone else.  As an EYB user, I wouldn't mind getting just the recipe titles indexed sooner, for the purpose of adding notes.  But I agree that would probably make the indexing process (including quality checks) very complicated for EYB, plus you would need to explain to EYB users why the ingredients are missing.  (And get lots of "ingredients are missing emails and notes in the meantime.)

I've also indexed a fairly large number of books, and I have to say that indexing the title and page numbers first are not at all how I do indexing.  I like to plug through and do everything for the recipe- so that I'm always up to date as far as I've gotten in terms of my indexing. This works for me because life gets in the way, and I have to stop and start my indexing sometimes, and I would completely lose track if it was in pieces in that way. 

Ah interesting! Some varied opinions clearly. I can see that this might annoy people, I guess it comes down to whether you use the "notes" or the "ingredients" features more! I will think about making notes against books that seem unlikely to get indexed @FJT. I wonder if @Cati is onto something, and there's something about the personal indexing process that could be made simpler instead. 

Thanks for your thoughts everybody!

I'd really, really love to see even just the title and page number, as a start!  For me, that would be enough to enable me to do a quick search and personally, I really don't need to know the exact ingredients in a recipe - if it sounds good, or in the category I require I can improvise if needs be.  And if the title doesn't give me any clues, it'd be a lot easier just to check out one or two titles to see if they are relevant to what I'm looking for.  In fact, I have had to start a 'title and meal category' index on my own computer for my own purposes, because around half my bookshelf isn't indexed and it seems it probably won't be.  I'm sure I'm still missing out lovely recipes available in my own home, simply because I don't want to haul a dozen or so books out of a very tight bookshelf and go through their indices each time I want to find a recipe; I tend to take the easy option and do an internet search for an online recipe!  (Which I could do without subscribing.)  I really do love and support the idea of EYB and I have subscribed, but I didn't realise when I did so that it wouldn't really help me as much as I'd hoped.  I would absolutely do indexing myself if it were possible to do it in stages, and that would add enormously to the value of membership, for me anyway.

I'm with kaliedra, I do most of my EYB searching by ingredient, which is what makes EYB such a huge help to me on a day-to-day basis - If I pull a particular vegetable out of the garden, need to use something up, or see a sale at the store, I can zero in on recipes that use it. Titles aren't all that useful when you are searching for an ingredient that may be buried in the recipe.

The way indexing is set up, it's most efficient for an indexer to do one recipe fully before moving to the next. The first book I indexed I entered all the titles first, then went back and did the rest of the entry. I discovered this added work because I had to manually add recipe types, ethnicity, courses, occasions, and nutrition that EYB usually auto-fills for indexers on the next recipe when you "save & new". If you are doing a cookbook that is organized by ingredient it's not as big of a deal because they bounce all over the place as far as type, but if it's a traditionally laid out book that does appetizers, soups, mains, sides, desserts, beverages... or one that groups similar recipes together, you are missing out on the time saving auto-fill feature if you just do the title/page number, and back-fill later. 

Kaliedra, I guess I do fairly often just search for an ingredient too, especially when thinking about what to do with a surplus of produce from the allotment!  I do understand what you mean when you say that sometimes the title doesn't give a clue to ingredients, but at least if I had titles of the recipes in the 70% or so of my books that aren't indexed, I might get a few more 'hits'.  Often, I am not fixed on any one ingredient, though; I am looking more vaguely for a type of meal, eg a fish terrine starter.  So I might type in a selection of related words such as 'terrine' 'pate' 'salmon' 'smoked' or some things like that and then skim through the results to see which of the hits sound like they might be possible 'starters', then I pull out the books that feature most often in the hits and have a browse manually to see if anything else leaps out and suggests itself!  In truth, I simply forget which books I actually have sometimes, and as they are scattered about the house it's 'out of sight, out of mind' a lot of the time.  Sad, I know... 

I may well be in a minority of one on the following, too, but while I'm here I will mention that I'd also rather see indexing efforts concentrating more on books than on the monthly magazines (such as Waitrose monthly of Good Food mag in the UK).  In general, they feature online so I can easily do an internet search without EYB for the contents of those.  But EYB helps me make the most of my lovely book collection, and I love to read the comments, blogs and all about the featured new books.

Ahh, that makes more sense.  With 2 local farms being the source for most of our food I don't set such aspirations as a particular anything because I never seem to get all the ingredients at once and that means I have to go to a grocery :D 

I would like to see titles and pages as a start too.  I peruse through recipe titles for inspiration to cook.