Canada’s Professional Society of Indexers Since 1977

Before I became an indexer, I worked for a company that made long-term services contracts with large companies. At the start of each engagement, we formed a deal team consisting of specialists—sales, solution designers, finance, and legal. The next thing we did was have a kickoff meeting where we introduced ourselves and our roles and talked about the deal’s goals. The meeting was often followed by a dinner and a social so that the deal team members could “bond”. Those were fun times, even for the introverts, which was almost everyone except the sales and legal people, for some weird reason.

Getting a book published is a big deal too, especially for the author. Perhaps the publisher and the author start with some kind of “deal team” formation, with a kickoff meeting and socializing. If there is, we indexers wouldn’t know. We swoop in near the end of the engagement. If there were any bonding moments, we missed them.

And what indexer would have the time for that kind of team building anyway?

Instead, there’s another way to begin a satisfying relationship with your client. And Pierke Bosschieter is going to show us how, when you come to the conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland this June 12-13. Visit the conference page for details.

When Wikipedia launched in 2001, it was almost a free-for-all. What a concept! Anybody can contribute and anybody can edit this free and open resource that aimed to be a living collection of the world’s knowledge.

But the question on everyone’s mind was, how do you control the accuracy of the information? Indeed, there were digital dust-ups in the earlier years as writers and editors fought back and forth over ideological slants, as well as inaccuracies and nonsense. Wikipedia was forced to work through these battles, and as a result, they’ve implemented sophisticated processes and controls for creating, editing, and reviewing articles.

Wikipedia now has 6 million articles on just the English site alone. If you’re a notable subject, meaning you have attracted attention for a significant period of time, you should be in there. And if you’re in there, what’s written about you had better be complete and accurate because that’s where online researchers look first.

The Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS) at Memorial University recognized this when they thought about the availability of research on Newfoundland and Labrador. And so, last fall, historian Jenny Higgins was named CNS’s first Wikipedian-in-Residence. You can hear about Jenny’s adventures in bringing depth to articles when she speaks at the conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland June 12-13. Register now and get your early bird discount.

Register now at the conference page and get your early bird discount.

If you have a bias toward traditional books, you may have been pleased to hear that e-books are still nowhere close to outselling print books?

The predictions of print’s decline have been wild. In 1999, Microsoft declared that by 2018, 90% of all books sold would be e-books. Then in 2013, Price Waterhouse Cooper presented a more moderate view: that e-books would only surpass print books in 2017. Now it appears that e-book sales have actually flattened at around 20-30% of all books sold.

We understand the easy appeal of the e-book format for fiction. But when it comes to non-fiction, more than one indexer has admitted to owning a copy of the same book in both formats. The story is usually like this: We needed the book right away, and it was so easy to download it from the Internet. Besides, we could take the book with us everywhere on our mobile devices. But then we turned around and also bought the print version because that’s really how we want to read non-fiction books.

Our publishing clients understand this, and many are producing both formats. But publishers also want to create a better e-book by having the index embedded. And for many indexers and publishers, embedded indexing is new territory.

You may have heard that Kate Mertes has been working with the Church Historians Press indexing the Joseph Smith Papers. In fact, she won the ASI/EIS Publishing Award for the index to Volume 3 in 2015. Kate told us that her work with the Press is ongoing: “We’ve transitioned from standard stand-alone indexing to an embedded system, and the press has enthusiastically invited, listened to, and implemented my ideas on how to make this work.”

We are delighted that Kate is coming to the ISC/SCI conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland this June 12-13 to give a presentation on her experiences. We concur with Kate that this is timely, “given how many indexers are dealing with this now, and it would show how you can move ahead technologically and produce quality indexes.”

Visit the conference page for details.