The Kids Are Right (in which a librarian complains about indexes)

I know that this is not a library blog. But I just need a forum to rant about something excessively librarianish, because in the world in which I work, this might actually be considered controversial:

I deal with a lot of 21-23 year-old 1L students who seem to have never had to look anything up in a set of printed books. Google and Wikipedia have existed since they were first literate enough to be assigned an essay on their favorite animal or a country they'd never heard of. Thus, some of these students need to be taught how to use an index. And there is usually a certain amount of disbelief the first time they look up a word in an index and the entry sends them to a different entry in the index, i.e., if under "Labor" it says, "see Employment Law, this index" (this disbelief is particularly strong, if, as is often the case, this requires looking in a different volume of the index).

My librarian colleagues and the legal writing professors take this disbelief as a sign of the students' naivete and stupidity, because, they say, in order to learn how to research, these students are going to have to learn how to use all of the excessively complicated indexes and numbering systems that have, for over a century, made doing American legal research with print materials feel like arcane shit that monks used to do by candlelight in the Middle Ages. I no longer agree with their view. The students' disbelief is completely warranted. They should never have to learn how to use these crappy indexes and other finding tools.

Case in point. Today, I helped a student use West's Federal Digest to look up cases about whether at-will employees can be fired for skipping work. This was the process of just finding the right section in the Digest:
- Look up Labor in the index, which says 'see Labor Relations'
- Look up Labor Relations in the index, which has unhelpful entries and says 'also see Employment Law'
- Look up Employment Law in the index (in a different volume), and it has a couple of good entries on the topic. They are listed as "Mast & S 8(2)" and "Mast & S 42." (If you did not know already know, like I did, that "Mast & S" is short for "Master & Servant," you would have to look that up in the front of the volume.)
- Look at the shelf. Volume 73C ends with "Marriage." Volume 74 begins with "Mayhem" (gotta love these topic headings). Is Volume 73D missing? There is no empty space for it on the shelf.
- No. I have a hunch. I look at the pocket part for the index. All of the entries for Employment Law point to Labor & Empl., not "Mast & S." There is no 73D. And there are no new entries for the subtopics I had identified in the main volume.
- Go to the first volume for the topic Labor & Employment and find the conversion chart that shows that Master & Servant 8(2) is now Labor & Employment 85 (by the way, nowhere near the section numbers that 8(1) and 8(3) now have), and Master & Servant 42 is now Labor & Employment 835.
- Hand the kid the book and tell him to look at sections 85 and 835.

Look, I know that, while this same task might be somewhat easier to do on Westlaw (with somewhat less comprehensive results), it is undoubtedly prohibitively expensive for most attorneys to use Westlaw for something like this. But, with the existence of Google Books and smart phones, and the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that libraries spend annually on these books, can anyone really defend the fact that we still have to do this shit, using multiple volumes of indexes, pocket parts, conversion tables, and wondering if volume 73D exists? It's bullshit.