Canada’s Professional Society of Indexers Since 1977

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.

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 31^st. Mary will collect them anonymously and pass them on to Rhonda.

Registration opens soon

We are excited to announce that our 2025 in-person conference will be taking place May 30–June 1, 2025, with pre-conference events on Thursday, May 29.

The conference will take place on the beautiful University of British Columbia (UBC) campus. There will be accommodations on campus for every budget, including suites, studios and pods. From there, it’s a short walk to the Museum of Anthropology, the UBC Botanical Garden, and lovely beaches and hiking trails.

The programming team is pulling together an array of speakers, including a panel of indexers offering their perspectives working on the same text, another on teaching indexing, and a presentation on setting rates. You’ll hear more about our program soon, and some of our speakers are interested in hearing from you! Keep an eye out for future updates.

The conference promises to be an amazing experience in a spectacular setting. Registration begins in February, so mark your calendars now and we’ll see you in May!