The Internet has stimulated interest in the history of indexes, but insufficiently detailed book indexes and manuscript catalogs make research in this field difficult. It has been claimed that concordances and subject indexes were invented in France in the thirteenth century, but alphabetical lists of words and phrases from the Hebrew Bible were compiled by the tenthcentury Masoretes. The Hebrew codicological database, Sfardata, lacks fields for the paratextual features of manuscripts, and the emerging standards for manuscript cataloging in the electronic environment lack detail in this area. Enhancing codicological databases and standards would facilitate tracing the origins of indexes.