2024 in Review
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.”
— C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Indexing
Book Indexing
I recently published a Substack and Blog post that provided a listing of all the books I indexed in 2024.
The list provides the title, author, and publisher information of my six published book indexing jobs of 2024, along with a brief abstract of each book. It also includes links to four book indexes that I have completed and which are available to view or download on my website.
Database Indexing
The Iraq-America Entanglement Documentation Project (IAEDP)
I officially started working on this project, headed by Nibras Kazimi, in the summer of 2023. IAEDP is an ambitious and uniquely relevant project, aimed at collecting all kinds of materials, from declassified government documents to oral history interviews and personal papers of key figures in the history of Iraq-U.S. relations.
My role in the project from 2023 through 2024 was to spearhead the digital archive creation and management aspect. IAEDP is still in its beginning stages, and work is currently being done to determine the best way forward on the software side, for website and database development. I very much look forward to being able to report more on the project in the future.
Background Reading for IAEDP
The Accidental Taxonomist, by Heather Hedden (2022)
Understanding Iraq, by William R. Polk (2005); Republic of Fear, by Kanan Makiya (1998)
Professional Development
Courses & Webinars
This ASI webinar explored techniques for improving efficiency in the indexing process as well as describe some little-used tools and functions that even experienced indexers may be unfamiliar with.
Controlled Vocabularies & Taxonomies — a four-part course by Henry Stewart Events
This course, presented by Heather Hedden, was geared for DAM managers who are familiar with taxonomies and controlled vocabularies as users, but who had limited experience in designing or creating them. Its focus was on how to build a good taxonomy.
This ASI Webinar, presented by Bill Wheaton, brought expertise from a geographer-turned-book indexer to discuss some considerations that can impact the treatment of place-names in an index. He also noted some authoritative resources that indexers could turn to for guidance.
This ASI Webinar, presented by Fred Leise, provided insights from an established and widely respected indexer on how to treat metatopics, with all their potential complexities, in biographical works.
This ASI course, presented by Elizabeth Bartmess, covered the process of designing and troubleshooting both simple and complex macros. Course content was widely applicable to different macro software products, while examples focused on Macro Express (Windows) and Keyboard Maestro (Mac), with some attention to other products.
American Society for Indexing (ASI)
ASI 2024 Conference
ASI’s first in-person conference since 2019. The plan as of now is to have alternating years of online and in-person conferences.
Some* of the sessions I attended were:
“Embedded Indexing in Microsoft Word,” by Devon Thomas.
“The Crystal Ball is Cloudy: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Indexing,” by John Magee.
“Black Hawk, White Bird, and Tsubasa (Wing): Dealing with Unusual Names,” by Judy Staigmiller and Anna Aridome.
“Editing Your Index to Ensure Quality,” by Joan Shapiro.
*See my blog post on the conference for more details.
We usually meet on the last Friday of every other month, via Zoom and the conference gave us our first opportunity to meet in person. It was nice to see all these people in real life!
I wrote a summary of the conference session on unusual names that was published in the Summer 2024 issue of ASI’s quarterly journal, Key Words — as well as a complete conference summary in my blog — and a “recap” of the H/A SIG meeting, which was published in the Fall 2024 issue of Key Words.
Southeast Chapter
The SE Chapter of ASI experienced a revival, thanks to the interest of a few members. We had our first Zoom meet-up in late October, after having been postponed due to hurricanes. This was an interesting meeting of four indexers from different backgrounds! It’s different from the H/A SIG since we don’t necessarily share a specialty but it proved to be a vibrant meet-up and I look forward to repeating it in the future.
December 6 Special Event: All About Indexing: From Thesauri to AI, Tools and Tips for Working Smarter
In September, I volunteered to help coordinate what has become an annual, December special event.
The event has, at least in recent years, been held on Zoom and attendees have web access to the videos for one year.
As part of my responsibilities, I reached out to ASI members to determine what they would be interested in seeing in the event line-up. I was ultimately able to recruit, with the help of ASI’s executive director, some pretty stellar presenters.
I published a Substack post in anticipation of the event, but was unfortunately unable to write a recap following the event, since it fell in the middle of a book indexing project that I needed to focus on before heading off for Christmas and New Year celebrations.
Event registration was very good, and we had some really thoughtful questions from attendees for the Q&A sessions. All the presenters did a spectacular job, and I’m looking forward to re-watching every single presentation now that I won’t be playing moderator. The “Happy Hour” that followed the official event was also lively, and we had some fascinating conversation about the presentations as well as other indexing-related topics.
Writing
Abstracting
My contract to write and edit abstracts for the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs’ Virtual Library continued through 2024. Their content on all things justice (from social services to forensic science) is available to the public, here: NCJRS Virtual Library Search | Office of Justice Programs (ojp.gov)
I am very thankful and fortunate to have this opportunity, and doubly fortunate that the abstracting work is flexible so I can budget my time appropriately, to allow for other projects that also require focused attention.
Non-Abstract Writings
Substack posts are more frequent than blog posts and include more newsletter-type information such as announcements of recently completed indexing projects.
Any Blog posts get automatically double-posted to Substack.
Thank You
Thus ends my report on the highlights of 2024 at VFJ Indexing & Word Services.
Cheers to a happy, healthy, and project-filled 2025.
