Announcements

Congratulations to Judy Dunlop on receiving the 2017 Ewart-Daveluy Indexing Award!

Judy Dunlop was presented with the Ewart-Daveluy Award for Excellence in Indexing at the awards banquet of the Indexing Society of Canada in Montréal on 2 June 2017. The award honours Judy’s indexing of One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography by Margaret Mackey, published by the University of Alberta Press.

One Child Reading is a unique and fascinating examination of reading and literacy development. Author Margaret Mackey revisits the things she read, viewed, listened to and wrote as she grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Newfoundland. Her reading included school texts, knitting patterns, musical scores, games, church bulletins, family magazines and hundreds of books. In One Child Reading, Mackey weaves her growing literacy and social consciousness with the books of her childhood and youth and the history of the time and place.

The indexer’s challenge was to combine in one comprehensive, cohesive index the three aspects of the book: the author’s memories, the theoretical discussion and the analysis of specific texts. In addition to standard terminology to cover off the biographical details, the indexer had to incorporate the sometimes unique terms the author created for the textual criticism and social analysis. As one judge noted, “This is an indexer who’s not afraid to directly express the language of the text … and also to use some ingenuity in handling sections like the distinction between a subject in theory vs. its relation to the author’s life.” Said another, “The index is wonderfully fulsome and narrative, and brief and concise—quite a feat.”  “There are some lovely discoverables in this index,” said the third. The author herself was “awestruck” by the “sensitivity of [the indexer’s] reading.”

An excerpt of the index is available here, with permission courtesy of the University of Alberta Press.

Mary Newberry was presented with the Ewart-Daveluy Award for Indexing Excellence at the awards banquet of the joint conference of the Indexing Society of Canada (ISC) and American Society for Indexing (ASI) in Chicago, IL, on 16 June 2016. The award honours Mary’s indexing of The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, volumes 1 and 2, edited by Douglas D.C. Chambers and David Galbraith and published by University of Toronto Press.

The Letterbooks of John Evelyn is a two-volume work with 1,150 pages and almost 900 letters between Evelyn and his 315 correspondents. John Evelyn, FRS, was an English writer, gardener and diarist of the late 1600s. His diaries are the usual source material for scholars, but like his diaries, Evelyn’s letters cast considerable light on the art, culture and politics of the time.

Making this letterbook material accessible to scholars was the job of the indexer, but it was not an easy job. The sheer volume of the material was one issue; another was the archaic diction and writing style of the seventeenth century. A third was the need to serve the scholars who were undoubtedly already familiar with the extensive index created for the 1955 publication of Evelyn’s diaries and would expect some correlation, while also serving modern indexing standards and user expectations. Interestingly, the index is not only printed in the books themselves but is also available online in clickable format. Despite these and other complications, Mary created a comprehensive index that demonstrates outstanding indexing expertise, analytical competence and index design skill. More than that, it exemplifies the index as a work of art.

An excerpt of the index is available here, courtesy of the University of Toronto Press.

Mary Newberry also received the 2016 Tamarack Award, for her services to the Society.

2015 Ewart-Daveluy Award Recipient: François Trahan

For Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, by Nancy J. Turner, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. This two-volume ethnobotanical work reflects forty years of research into the people-plant interrelationships of the First Nations in British Columbia. The two indexes can be viewed here.