“Spread Your Indexing Wings,”

The conference theme was inspired by Bryn Mawr’s official seal: the owl. Owl imagery can be seen throughout the campus.

The sessions I attended were:

• “Embedded Indexing in Microsoft Word,” a pre-conference workshop presented by Devon Thomas.

  • I’ve created embedded indexes in Adobe InDesign but my experience indexing in Microsoft Word is limited to some test indexing I’ve done on my own. Devon’s workshop was several hours long and we discussed some basic and not-so-basic aspects of indexing in Word. She also went over some tools, including Index Manager…

• “Flying High with Index Manager,” by Pilar Wyman.

  • Pilar’s session was very informative and showed the versatility of the dedicated indexing software, Index Manager, which can be used to create embedded indexes in Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Word, or other similarly based programs, as well as to create standalone back-of-the-book indexes.

• “The Crystal Ball is Cloudy: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Indexing,” by John Magee.

  • John Magee is a representative from Gale, “a global provider of research and learning resources.” Many people are familiar with Gale through their library subscriptions to a wide variety of databases, such as Academic OneFile. He has been a speaker at several ASI events; this time he focused on what AI and machine learning are, providing some insights into implications for the book-indexing industry.

• “Indexing Lives,” by Kendra Millis

  • Kendra started out with some background on the different types of biographies: political biographies; military; historical biographies; literary; general/cultural; sports biographies; survivor/extreme situations; hagiographies; and autobiographies, which include memoirs and journals. Her session essentially covered some big biography questions, including how the target audience impacts an indexer’s approach to the text and the terms that will be used in the index; the use of qualifiers; good indexing practice regarding some unique situations for biographical works, including secondary or dual subjects (i.e., two metatopics); and tricky name situations.

• “Black Hawk, White Bird, and Tsubasa (Wing): Dealing with Unusual Names,” by Judy Staigmiller and Anna Aridome.

  • I provided a write-up to this session that will be published in the next Key Words issue. The presenters focused on naming practices in Native American and Japanese culture, and how to approach those names when indexing. They had very good insights about some things to be cautious about, as well as helpful reference resources.

• “Editing Your Index to Ensure Quality,” by Joan Shapiro.

  • Joan discussed the importance and timing of index editing, and walked through her own checklist, with good audience participation.

• “Broaden Your Cindex Wingspan,” by Maria A. Sullivan

  • Maria provided insights into the most recent developments and updates to Cindex, the dedicated indexing software (DIS) that I use.

• “On Beyond Indexing: Indexing-Adjacent Jobs,” by Michele Combs.

  • To prepare, the presenter emailed me with some questions about abstracting work. She also covered bibliography creation, research and fact-checking, genealogical research, thesaurus and taxonomy design, qualitative data coding, archival processing, metadata creation (aka cataloguing), and more.

The History/Archaeology Special Interest Group (HA SIG)

Some HA SIG members met up, for the first time in person, and had dinner on Wednesday at an Irish pub.

More scenes from the conference…