newbie question: data structure for book indexing

[Peter Nelson]

I'm an editor without much programming experience.

What I want to do is write an application in Python to facilitate manual 
indexing of books -- i.e. cardfile-type indexing by professional 
indexers, not machine indexing.

Indexing apps I've worked with in the past basically replicate the 
indexer's 3x5 index card file -- you add one entry at a time, then 
"compile" the index when you're done.

What would be the best way to store and access this data? I'm thinking 
that using a bsddb recno database might be simplest. But because the 
index itself is ultimately a (very) sorted structure, would it make 
sense to try storing the data in BTree format?

Would it make sense to design a Python class IndexEntry to mimic the 
functionality of index cards, then store this in a db via shelve?

Any suggestions on where to get more info would be appreciated.
Thanks,
PN