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 the second session on Saturday, Scripture and Ancient Sources Indexing: Current Developments, presenter Richard Shrout gave a brief introduction to both the indexing of standard scriptures and the indexing of ancient sources. He introduced the current version of Best Practices for Scripture and Ancient Sources indexing, while giving examples from current projects.
He described Rabbinic writing categories, then gave the steps involved in preparing scripture indexes for Rabbinic writings.
- Convert the abbreviations to real titles.
- Determine the categories using the real titles using Wikipedia as the source.
- Arrange the categories and sub-categories in forced sort order.
Christian scriptures include Hebrew, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. He gave examples of marked up pages from a project a few years ago, then a few pages from a recently completed index as it was submitted.
He gave criteria for preparing rates for scripture and ancient sources indexes. To determine the highest rate possible, estimate the number of entries per page and the difficulty of locating entries, with entries in different formats and/or in extensive footnotes at the highest level. Figure the standard scriptures at the lowest level, and complicated ancient sources at the highest level.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss the following Saturday 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, https://www.stellarsearches.com.