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

Professional Development

Courses & Webinars

American Society for Indexing (ASI)

ASI 2024 Conference

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.

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

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.

Thank You