Archive for the ‘indexing’ Category

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ASI 2025 Virtual Conference: Introduction to Book Design Process

Thursday, June 5th, 2025

The American Society for Indexing held its 2025 Virtual Conference, “Spring into Action,” on Friday, April 25, 2025, and Saturday, April 26, 2025.  Sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

In one of the sessions on Friday, An Introduction to the Book Design Process, presenter Anna Aridome gave an overview of the book design process to provide a background for the indexing professional.

She discussed parts of the book, printer specifications, spreads, and typography. She defined leading, the spacing between vertical lines. She discussed special formatting for e-readers and how it differs from print books. She also explained typographic units of measure such as points and picas, specifying that one pica equals 12 points, and how to convert from picas and inches to points.

She gave special typographic specifications for indexes, such as columns, hyphenation, typeface size, leading, use of italics, and indents. She said that indexes use a smaller font size than the text in the book, one or two points smaller.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss another Friday session from the ASI 2025 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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ASI 2025 Virtual Conference: Spring into Action

Saturday, May 10th, 2025

The American Society for Indexing held its 2025 Virtual Conference, “Spring into Action,” on Friday, April 25, 2025, and Saturday, April 26, 2025.  Sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

In one of the early sessions on Friday, Keeping the Pulse of Your Freelance Business, presenter Natalie Silver gave prompts and templates to use annually, quarterly, and monthly. She discussed how it is vital to give yourself time and space to reflect on your business regularly, not only to hold yourself accountable and assess the health of your business but allow yourself room to explore what’s possible professionally.

She advocated the power of journaling, saying you can start whenever. When planning for the year, she suggested holding an annual retreat. When planning for the quarter, she recommended making a list of what you want to accomplish over a three-month period.

She provided a monthly planning sheet, which gives space for projects, intentions for the month, marketing plans/content, professional development, and networking, as well as weekly reflection.

When planning for the week, she suggested writing out your plans at the end of the day on Friday. Write in appointments and schedule out the week in a planner.

Then she gave suggestions for planning for a day, such as accomplishing three tasks in the day, breaking them down by hour.

She concluded by sharing time management resources that she uses.

In the next blog postings, I will discuss other Friday sessions from the ASI 2025 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Tips for Indexing Notes

Monday, August 5th, 2024

The American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the last session, And Furthermore . . .: Tips for Indexing Notes, Fred Leise shared his expertise on indexing notes.

He discussed note indexability guidelines:

  • Where a note appears, as a footnote, end-of-chapter note, or end-of-text note, does not affect the indexability of the note.
  • Do not index purely bibliographical notes, that is, notes that detail the source of the author’s comments and include only publication details.
  • Do index notes that contain substantive information, discussing a person, place, thing, or idea. However, do not index information that is merely a continuation of the discussion in the main text.

He then discussed locators for notes and gave the single note, multiple sequential notes, and extended notes formats and examples. He also identified differentiable notes and paragraph IDs.

He concluded by giving his notes indexing process, saying that he never reads the entire content of the notes and that he quickly recognizes the difference between bibliographic and substantive notes. He outlined his steps for indexing footnotes, end-of-chapter notes, and end-of-text notes.

This concludes the series of blog postings on the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Making Work Feel Less Like Work

Wednesday, July 17th, 2024

American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the third session, Dr. Lindsay McGraw, a physical therapist, talked about the office setup in Making Work Feel Less Like Work. An expert on office ergonomics, she revealed how to achieve ergonomic health by properly setting up the office, noticing what hurts and discovering why, as well as establishing healthy habits for long-term wellness.

She started out by giving an alignment checklist:

  • Hips should be at the back of the chair; back should be supported.
  • Feet should be on the floor or supported so the knees are slightly below hip height.
  • Elbows should stay underneath shoulders with shoulders relaxed.
  • Wrists should be at elbow height.
  • Eyes should be level with the top of the monitor.
  • Monitor should be arms’ width away from you.

She advocated rearranging your space so that items you need are in the zone closest to you on the desk. She encouraged participants to create healthy habits:

  • Take breaks and change positions as you work.
  • Take vision breaks.
  • Drink water.
  • Get outside.
  • Get good sleep.

She concluded the session with stretching exercises to prevent soreness.

I will focus on the final session of the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks in the next blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Project Tracking Like a Pro

Wednesday, June 5th, 2024

American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the second session, Project Tracking Like a Pro, Marilyn Augst described the organizational system she uses to keep track of projects, clients, and payments. She gave insight on organizing information on clients, projects, and statistics. Tracking when projects are coming in, planning how you need to allocate your time, and scheduling time for administrative work improves efficiency.

She suggested creating directories and folders on your computer and email. Each publisher should have a directory with the current books, notes, and project summaries. She recommended putting the indexing specifications in the notes file for each publisher. For Style Sheets, she saves one of the index files as a template in CINDEX. She said she keeps a Chapter Work Plan, in addition to a Summary Sheet and a Time Sheet.

She tracks how much time she spends on markup and entry in an Access database. She said she is able to figure out her overhead, as well as her hourly rate, to determine which publishers end up paying better. She strongly urged keeping backup files and saving a new file every few chapters. She suggested using a template for the invoice and sending it the day after you submit the index. She keeps a list of all invoices in Excel. Being able to track clients and projects in an organized and efficient manner enables you to do more indexing, she said.

I will focus on the next session of the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks in the following blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Show Those PDFs Who’s Boss

Sunday, May 19th, 2024

The American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the first session, Kendra Millis discussed hacks to use when working with PDFs in Show Those PDFs Who’s Boss.

She explained why indexers should learn to make changes to PDFs:

  • Making changes yourself is faster than requesting new PDFs from the client.
  • You can modify the PDF to suit your needs.
  • Handling it yourself makes life easier for your client.

She explained and showed what changes can be made:

  • Making PDF pages match the text pages.
  • Cropping pages to remove extra white space.
  • Changing spreads into single pages.
  • Extracting notes pages into a separate file.
  • Resaving a file to work around security settings.
  • Removing watermarks.
  • Combining chapter files into one master file.

She also explained what can’t be changed:

  • Full password protected files.
  • Removing line numbers and some watermarks.

I will focus on the next sessions of the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks in successive blog postings. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: E-book Indexes–More than Meets the Eye

Saturday, December 2nd, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The last session on Saturday, E-book Indexes: More than Meets the Eye, was presented by Dr. Mary Coe.  Dr. Coe took audience members in the mind’s eye of the reader when presenting her research on how people find information in e-books, then shared her recommendations on how to make e-book indexes better.

She addressed the question of what is used for index locators when there are no page numbers in an e-book with active indexes, which take the reader directly to the location of the term on which they clicked.  Should an index entry target land on a paragraph, line, or word?   Readers can get frustrated if they don’t find exactly what they want when clicking on a term in an active index.

She said that very little research has been done on the use of indexes in e-books, with studies only asking participants if they found answers to questions and not how they found their answers.  For her research, she set up a digital usability lab and gave participants tasks to explore e-book indexes.

As a result of her research, she made the following recommendations for active e-book indexes:

• make index scanning and navigating easier

• provide a link to the index from TOC or alpha navigation bars at the top to facilitate moving around the index

• match page number locators to print books if possible

• add an index icon to the toolbar or at least link the index to the TOC

• recognize how readers use an index with other tools, such as search

This concludes the blog series on the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Live Indexing Demo

Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The second session on Saturday, Live Indexing Demo, was presented by Shannon Li.  Ms. Li indexed live the introduction and first chapter from a scholarly book, The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century by Jeffrey F. Hamburger.

She started by looking up the book’s description on the publisher’s website to get a sense of the metatopic.  She copied and pasted this to her indexing program to keep it on the top of her mind as she worked.  She flagged a few potential entries in the introduction but said she usually doesn’t get too many there.  She used the introduction to gain a sense of the book’s overall structure.

As she delved into Chapter 1, she scanned the section headings, but said they were too vague and likely too general to use as entries.  She selected a number of proper names as entries, copying and pasting from the PDF that she had open on the screen.  Her dedicated indexing software program was open to the right, so that she could see the progress on the index.  She also selected a number of terms, such as authority, authorship, and inspiration, and created subheadings as she worked.  Other entries included such headings as author portraits and Rhetoric (personification).

She searched for potential entries in the PDF to see how many times they occurred and if they merited breaking down into subheadings.  She flagged entries that needed further attention in different colors: red for reworking and green for possible deletion if short on space.  She made notes to herself in brackets, such as double post, reword, or add a cross-reference.  She avoided spelling errors by copying and pasting everything directly from the PDF into the indexing software.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the third Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

 

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Mapping Words–A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing

Saturday, August 5th, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023 and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The fourth session on Friday, Mapping Words: A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing, was presented by June Sawyers, who is both a writer and an indexer.  She focused her talk on writers who are also indexers, such as Virginia Woolf, as well as the traits writers and indexers need to possess in order to be successful.

Virginia Woolf wrote an index for her book, Orlando, with sub-entries for the character showing cross-dressing and his arch of life.  She and her husband started a literary press, Hogarth Press, to publish literary works by friends, and so she wrote indexes for these books.

Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was also a writer and an indexer.  He wrote an index for his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno.  His entries were humorous and whimsical, she said, with such subject headings as the following:

  • bed, reasons for never going to
  • sobriety, extreme inconvenience of

A contemporary writer and indexer is Larry Sweazy, who writes the murder mystery series, which includes See Also Murder.

The traits of a successful writer include:

  • read quickly and carefully
  • good communication skills
  • commitment and perseverance
  • self-motivation
  • empathy with the reader
  • work alone for long periods of time
  • detail-oriented
  • good spelling
  • grammar skills
  • good organization skills
  • think theoretically
  • wide general knowledge
  • passion for reading
  • independent

The traits of an indexer are much the same as that of a writer, except that an indexer is usually anonymous.  A novel also might take years to write, and an index has a much shorter deadline.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the first Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

 

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: The History of Stoplists

Sunday, July 2nd, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023 and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The third session on Friday, The History of Stoplists: Lists of Words Not Indexed, was presented by Bella Hass Weinberg, a Professor at St. John’s University.  Stoplists (lists of words not indexed) were thought to be developed in the 1950s in conjunction with automatic indexing.  The first Hebrew concordance (word index) to the Bible, entitled Me’ir Nativ (15th century), contained a stoplist that is similar to modern ones in that it consists of function words, such as prepositions.  Me’ir Nativ was modeled on the Latin Biblical concordance of Arlottus.

Selected words from the Hebrew stoplist of Me’ir Nativ include:

  • all                                      lest                                         thus
  • already                              maybe                                    to
  • also                                    not                                        under
  • because                             only                                       very
  • before                                or                                           was
  • between                            please                                    what
  • but                                     she                                         when
  • for                                      that                                        who
  • from                                   then                                       why
  • he                                      therefore                                with
  • how                                    these
  • if                                         this

 

She discussed theological debates over the meanings of function words and related the concept of stoplist to indexable matter.   She also described common terminology for stopwords and stoplists in search engine optimization, computing, and artificial intelligence.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the following Friday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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