Information Literacy Skills > Alphabetisation

Introduction

In handling information we are often faced with items in alphabetical order, such as:

• Indexes in books and journals
• Guide words at the top of pages in dictionaries
• Ordering of articles in encyclopaedias
• Entries in directories such as The Phone Book
• Lists of topics on websites

We are all familiar with the order of the letters in the alphabet and it is fairly easy to put a list of words into alphabetical order. Similar words have to be sorted carefully applying the alphabet letter by letter through the words.

However, problems arise when the items listed consist of more than one word or include numbers or abbreviations.

The following sections cover these aspects and will help you use alphabetical indexes and lists quickly and efficiently.

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