Canada’s Professional Society of Indexers Since 1977

The Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI) is Canada’s national association of indexers.

We invite you to find an indexer for your project, read our publications, discover our conferences, events, and resources for indexers, find out about membership, and learn about the Society.

Find an indexer

Find an indexer who works in the subject area of your project.

Find resources

Find information about indexes, indexing practices, and training in indexing.

Attend an event

Attend a local meeting of indexers or attend the annual conference.

Become a member

Join the Society and enjoy the benefits of membership.

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What practices will help me with good index term selection?

Term selection is a key factor that determines the quality and usability of an index. Good index terms are clear, … […]

Upcoming Events

Conference Scholarship

Indexing Society of Canada

ISC/SCI is offering scholarships to three ISC/SCI members to help them attend the conference in Vancouver at the end of May. The scholarship will pay the two-day early-bird conference fee plus banquet ticket. You are eligible to apply if you meet both of these conditions:

  • You live at least 1000 km from Vancouver.
  • You will contribute to the conference by performing just one of these tasks (you choose the task):
    • Write an article about the conference.
    • Generate a list of five questions that can be asked of the general audience at the conference.
    • Help at the registration desk.

Preference will be given to new indexers, then those who have never attended a conference, then everyone else. See the Conference Scholarship form for more information and the application form. The deadline for applying is April 15, 2025.

ASI 2025 Conference Registration Is Open

Indexing Society of Canada

ASI is holding their Conference 2025 online on April 25 and 26, 2025, with a preconference workshop on April 24, 2025. Information can be found at their website.

Members of ISC/SCI (as a sister society) get a discount. Sign in, go to services/membership benefits, and you will find the codes for both the conference and the preconference workshop!

Conference Registration is Now Open

Conference Committee

The Indexing Society of Canada/Société canadienne d’indexation invites you to join us at our annual conference May 30-31, 2025, at the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This year’s theme is “Location! Location! Location!”

The keynote address will be delivered by Rhonda Kronyk, Project Coordinator for the Indigenous Editors Association, editor, and public speaker. Her presentation will focus on the 2nd edition of Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style

Conference sessions on indexing include “X-Men United, Indexers Divided?”, a roundtable of star-studded indexers describing their differing approaches to indexing the same piece of text, “Indexing Conundrums” with Max McMaster, “AI…where you can use it and where you shouldn’t! (Elizabeth Bartmess), “A Flow Chart for Passing Mentions” (Emma Warnken Johnson), and “Hansard Indexing: A roadmap to parliamentary debate” (Kim Christie).

Sessions on managing your business include “‘X’ Marks the Spot: Uncovering the right rate for your indexing services” (Michelle Guiliano) and “Large, Larger, Largest: How to handle large and complicated indexing assignments” (Caroline Depieveen).

We are delighted to include a session with Natalie Grant, Assistant Professor of Teaching in UBC Faculty of Medicine, Physical Therapy. Natalie will lead us through exercises we can do to keep our muscles and tendons fit and free.

As part of our conference welcome, we are planning a Thursday evening get-together. On Thursday afternoon, you can join us in a craft session–more about that soon.

New and aspiring indexers can register for the Thursday afternoon Fireside Chat session. You don’t have to be an indexer to attend.

On Sunday afternoon, we are hosting a Live Indexing workshop with Stephen Ullstrom. Enrolment will be limited.

We hope you will book your accommodations on campus, so that you can be just steps away from the conference venue and all the activities. We’ve been given very competitive rates for a variety of types of rooms. The descriptions and pricing is on the conference home page.

To learn more and to register for the conference, visit the conference page.

Help for tough questions

Conference Committee

Do you have examples of texts where you were not completely comfortable with either what you were reading or your approach to indexing?

Well, we have exciting news: Rhonda Kronyk, Project Coordinator for the Indigenous Editors Association, will be the keynote speaker at the ISC/SCI Conference in Vancouver. Her presentation will focus on the second edition of Dr. Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style.

From the Indigenous Editor’s Association (IEA) and her website, Rhonda Kronyk specializes in editing manuscripts by and about Indigenous Peoples. A settler and a member of the Tsay Keh Dene Nation (Treaty 8), she calls amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) in Treaty 6 home. Rhonda is a founding member of the IEA, where she is Project Coordinator. Since 2018, she has been educating editors, writers, book and magazine publishers, and university publishing students on how to publish culturally respectful stories by and about Indigenous Peoples through in-person and virtual presentations and workshops. She has edited and proofread manuscripts by some of Canada’s best known Indigenous authors, including Richard Van Camp, Monique Grey Smith, and Drew Hayden Taylor.

To help direct her talk to indexers, Rhonda would like to know about the tough issues you encounter when indexing Indigenous-related texts. Please gather your comments, queries, and problematic index entries and send them to Mary at maryjnewberry@outlook.com by March 31st. Mary will collect them anonymously and pass them on to Rhonda.

Registration opens soon

Reminder of Submission Deadline: ISC/SCI Ewart-Daveluy Award for Excellence in Indexing 2025

Indexing Society of Canada

Submission deadline: Friday, March 14, 2025

Submissions are open! The application has never been easier.

  • It’s all online.
  • You don’t need a hard copy — a PDF of the published book AND/OR the PDF sent to you by the publisher plus your Word/RTF file of the index.
  • The cost is only $30.

The benefits:

  • The winner will receive two tickets to the conference banquet at the next in-person conference.
  • We provide feedback for up to three runners-up.

No restriction to the subject matter or genre — textbooks, cookbooks, guidebooks, memoirs, art books, how-to books, travel books, all books — it’s your index we will be looking at.

Show us how you creatively overcame challenges, resulting in an outstanding, well-structured, easy-to-navigate, clear and comprehensive guide for all of its users.

Give us a challenge. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Maybe you’ll get the prize (which won’t happen if you don’t apply). And if not, you’re likely to get expert confidential feedback. That’s worth a lot.

This year you can submit indexes published in 2023 and 2024. If you are a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada, this is the time to do it. If you are not a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, you may submit an index if you were a member of ISC/SCI at the time you wrote the index.

The deadline for submissions is March 14, 2025. Please see the Ewart-Daveluy Award page for guidelines, criteria, and the submission form.

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