ISC/SCI member wins the Purple Pen award

The Institute of Certified Indexers has announced that Jess Klaassen-Wright has won the 2020 Purple Pen Competition. Jess’s index appears in the book Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions by Oludamini Ogunnaike (to be published in October 2020 by Pennsylvania State University Press).

Jess created an index for this 450-page book which deals with interdisciplinary practice combining the fields of religion and philosophy, a most challenging text for a newer indexer. The judges noted Jess’s work for its attention to detail in a book with many non-English terms and diacritics, and for the web of connections she built through many helpful cross-references, especially linking the foreign phrases to their English synonyms.

Jess Klaassen-Wright

In response to the news of Jess’s award, the author, Oludamini Ogunnaike, wrote: “Jess was amazing. While doing the indexing, she caught several typos and mistakes in the text that the copyeditor and I had missed, and did a remarkable job tracing the arguments and concepts across the book, which is quite long and complicated—involving terms in Arabic, Yoruba, French, and English, and multiple conceptual traditions. Her index has made the book much easier to navigate and provided a sympathetic and insightful guide for readers. I was particularly impressed by the way she tracked distinct, but related concepts across the different traditions discussed, and represented both these distinctions and relations in the index. Ms. Klaasen-Wright was also incredibly professional and worked remarkably swiftly and carefully, I cannot recommend her work highly enough.”

With her undergraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan (major in English and minors in Spanish and psychology), Jess completed her indexing training at Simon Fraser University and then participated in the Mary Newberry Mentorship Program of the Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI).  In particular, Jess has appreciated the guidance of such well-known indexers as Noeline Bridge and Audrey McClelland. 

Jess completed her first index in 2019 for a scholarly monograph on the history of magic in Elizabethan England. Since then, she has indexed books in local and oral history, biography, Black feminism and feminist theory, English literature, biblical studies, international relations, and agrarian politics and economics. In addition to indexing, she works as a freelance copy editor and proofreader. An active member of the ISC/SCI, she serves on the Society’s Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Committee (TIDE).

This is the seventh year that the international contest has been held by ICI, and the fifth time that a Canadian indexer has won the prize. For a list of previous winners, please see certifiedindexers.com.

2020 Diversity in Canadian Publishing Bursary Award: Sandra Muchekeza

August 31, 2020, Toronto: The Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI) is pleased to announce that Sandra Muchekeza is the 2020 ISC/SCI Diversity in Canadian Publishing Bursary Award recipient. The selection committee received ten applications, from which four applicants were shortlisted.

Sandra Muchekeza was born and raised in Kenya before moving to Australia for her Bachelor studies in Psychology. After completing her studies, she joined her family in Toronto, Canada where she started a career in Project Management in the not for profit sector. Over time, Sandra developed a keen interest in Diversity, Equality and Inclusion and works hard to ensure the voices of the marginalized are heard.

Sandra is currently the Executive Director at the Council of Canadians of African and Caribbean Heritage (CCACH) based in Edmonton, Alberta. CCACH supports activities that enhance the social, economic and educational life of African and Caribbean heritage communities in Edmonton. Passionate about the rights of women in every aspect of their lives, Sandra sits on the Board of YWCA Edmonton an organization that fights for the right to equal economic opportunities for women and girls and works towards ending gender-based violence.

Sandra loves the world of books so it is hardly a surprise that she and her sister founded a children’s books publishing company called Asili Kids. The company produces and distributes books which have content and characters that children of African heritage can identify with and introduces children from all over the world to African stories.

Married with two young boys Sandra loves spending quality time with her family, dabbling with photography, trying out new food recipes and of course, reading.

About the award

Since 2014, when the hashtag #weneeddiversebooks appeared, the Canadian publishing industry has slowly been waking up to both the lack of diverse voices and the demand for them. With this bursary, ISC/SCI aims to help achieve equality of opportunity for aspiring indexers belonging to underrepresented and/or marginalized groups. The bursary covers fees for an approved indexing program, two years of ISC membership with listing, and entry into the Mary Newberry Mentorship program.

2020 Tamarack Award: Margaret De Boer

The Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI) is pleased to announce the 2020 recipient of the Tamarack Award. Margaret de Boer (Toronto) is being recognized for her contribution and commitment to the society.

Margaret was chosen for her time as president and past president on the executive committee, and for additional time and service spent on many various committees. Margaret’s colleagues had the following to say about her:

She’s calm, thoughtful, and very fair when the time comes to make a decision. Her leadership was always kind-hearted, to the benefit to the executive as well as the full ISC/SCI membership.

Margaret is many things—smart, thorough, thoughtful and courageous; she is an independent thinker. 

Margaret’s diligence and thoroughness are assets to our meetings as she pushes us to ensure that we’re being clear, precise, and productive on whatever issues we deal with.

“I am thrilled to present this award to Margaret, and we are honoured to have her as a member of our society,” said Alexandra Peace, President.

The Tamarack Award was instituted to recognize members who go “above and beyond the call of duty” in their volunteer work for the Society.

2020 Ewart-Daveluy Award: Anna Olivier and Carla DeSantis

In the award’s fifth year (in a year unlike any other), we are thrilled to note that the outstanding quality of submissions allowed two awards to be presented.

Carla DeSantis was presented with a Ewart-Daveluy Award for her index to Heather Bamford’s Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600, published by University of Toronto Press.

One of the challenges to indexing this book was to correctly identify the array of proper names, titles, and terms spanning a huge range of languages. Carla’s index accomplishes this. In addition, the major themes are well analysed with consistent and informative sub-entries and entries for a considerable and useful gathering of scattered discussions. Of note is that this is only Carla’s second index!

View an excerpt from the index, courtesy of University of Toronto Press.

Anna Olivier was presented with a Ewart-Daveluy Award for her indexes to Les générations des Soufis: Tabaqat al-sufiyya de Abu Abd al-Rahman, Muhammad b. Husayn al-Sulamī, translated and presented by Jean-Jacques Thibon, and published by Brill.

The complex text is analysed and indexed in creative ways. Anna’s indexes were found to be valuable tools for various scholars, including those doing research in the Science of Hadith, and equally useful to linguists, literary critics, and specialists.

View Anna’s work, which includes a glossarial index plus separate indexes for names, places, themes, and works, courtesy of Brill publishing.

Basic Cyber-security for Working at Home

If you’re an indexer who works from home—which is all of us these days—maintaining your internet and device security is critical. But keeping up to date on best practices is not so easy.

In just an hour you can fix that by watching this recorded webinar called “Basic Cyber-security for Working at Home”. It was given this week by Jon Lewis at CIRA, the not-for-profit domain registry for “.ca” domains, and webnames.ca, the web hosting service that hosts our website indexers.ca.

Using plain language and only the most basic technical terms, it covers WIFI, your personal devices, passwords, backups, and phishing. Jon says this is an especially vulnerable time for computer users, as criminals are exploiting the COVID-19 crisis. And that’s what makes this presentation so timely.

The presentation is on Youtube. If you want the slides, you can download them from webnames.ca’s blog. Next week they plan to post the Q&As from the webinar on the blog.