Announcements

2020 Ewart-Daveluy Award: Anna Olivier and Carla DeSantis

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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

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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.

2020 Conference Cancelled

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Given the World Health Organization’s announcement of a pandemic, we have determined to move forward with an abundance of caution. ISC/SCI is cancelling this year’s conference.

We have no plans to hold any online presentations, but intend to hold the conference next year in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Planning for next year’s conference—which we hope to be similar to what we had planned for this year—will start again in September, 2020.

If you registered for the conference, your fees will be refunded to you over the next week. If you do not receive a notice about your refund by March 25, please contact treasurer@indexers.ca.

We are sad and disappointed to announce this, but hope that everyone stays safe and well and comes to see us next year in Newfoundland!

Information as a Key to Democracy

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Stone figures holding a tablet

Access to government information is one of the key elements of a thriving democracy. And it’s the government’s responsibility to be the stewards of that information.

One aspect of governments’ stewardship is defining the scope of the information. To illustrate, if the scope is everything produced by government, does it include voter cards, power bill inserts, and tourism brochures? This sounds a bit like the indexer’s perennial question, “Is it indexable?”

Another aspect of government’s stewardship is making the information accessible…especially when it comes to those dense reports. Clearly, the solution is indexes. And because governments are always producing reports, the opportunities for indexers who do this kind of work is probably endless.

Thanks to Max McMaster, you can learn all about indexing government reports and the specific skills that are needed when you come to the conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland June 12-13.

Register here on the conference page.

National Indexing Day

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Congratulations to the Society of Indexers on organizing their fourth annual National Indexing Day on March 31. They are holding a half-day conference on book indexing that will be of interest to editors and anyone else in the publishing industry.

If you have friends and colleagues near London, England, why not let them know. Here’s a link to the press release.