Posts Tagged ‘American Society for Indexing’

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Indexing Life Hacks: Tips for Indexing Notes

Monday, August 5th, 2024

The American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the last session, And Furthermore . . .: Tips for Indexing Notes, Fred Leise shared his expertise on indexing notes.

He discussed note indexability guidelines:

  • Where a note appears, as a footnote, end-of-chapter note, or end-of-text note, does not affect the indexability of the note.
  • Do not index purely bibliographical notes, that is, notes that detail the source of the author’s comments and include only publication details.
  • Do index notes that contain substantive information, discussing a person, place, thing, or idea. However, do not index information that is merely a continuation of the discussion in the main text.

He then discussed locators for notes and gave the single note, multiple sequential notes, and extended notes formats and examples. He also identified differentiable notes and paragraph IDs.

He concluded by giving his notes indexing process, saying that he never reads the entire content of the notes and that he quickly recognizes the difference between bibliographic and substantive notes. He outlined his steps for indexing footnotes, end-of-chapter notes, and end-of-text notes.

This concludes the series of blog postings on the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Making Work Feel Less Like Work

Wednesday, July 17th, 2024

American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the third session, Dr. Lindsay McGraw, a physical therapist, talked about the office setup in Making Work Feel Less Like Work. An expert on office ergonomics, she revealed how to achieve ergonomic health by properly setting up the office, noticing what hurts and discovering why, as well as establishing healthy habits for long-term wellness.

She started out by giving an alignment checklist:

  • Hips should be at the back of the chair; back should be supported.
  • Feet should be on the floor or supported so the knees are slightly below hip height.
  • Elbows should stay underneath shoulders with shoulders relaxed.
  • Wrists should be at elbow height.
  • Eyes should be level with the top of the monitor.
  • Monitor should be arms’ width away from you.

She advocated rearranging your space so that items you need are in the zone closest to you on the desk. She encouraged participants to create healthy habits:

  • Take breaks and change positions as you work.
  • Take vision breaks.
  • Drink water.
  • Get outside.
  • Get good sleep.

She concluded the session with stretching exercises to prevent soreness.

I will focus on the final session of the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks in the next blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Project Tracking Like a Pro

Wednesday, June 5th, 2024

American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the second session, Project Tracking Like a Pro, Marilyn Augst described the organizational system she uses to keep track of projects, clients, and payments. She gave insight on organizing information on clients, projects, and statistics. Tracking when projects are coming in, planning how you need to allocate your time, and scheduling time for administrative work improves efficiency.

She suggested creating directories and folders on your computer and email. Each publisher should have a directory with the current books, notes, and project summaries. She recommended putting the indexing specifications in the notes file for each publisher. For Style Sheets, she saves one of the index files as a template in CINDEX. She said she keeps a Chapter Work Plan, in addition to a Summary Sheet and a Time Sheet.

She tracks how much time she spends on markup and entry in an Access database. She said she is able to figure out her overhead, as well as her hourly rate, to determine which publishers end up paying better. She strongly urged keeping backup files and saving a new file every few chapters. She suggested using a template for the invoice and sending it the day after you submit the index. She keeps a list of all invoices in Excel. Being able to track clients and projects in an organized and efficient manner enables you to do more indexing, she said.

I will focus on the next session of the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks in the following blog posting. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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Indexing Life Hacks: Show Those PDFs Who’s Boss

Sunday, May 19th, 2024

The American Society for Indexing held a Virtual Special Event, Indexing Life Hacks, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023. Four sessions were presented virtually via Zoom. In the first session, Kendra Millis discussed hacks to use when working with PDFs in Show Those PDFs Who’s Boss.

She explained why indexers should learn to make changes to PDFs:

  • Making changes yourself is faster than requesting new PDFs from the client.
  • You can modify the PDF to suit your needs.
  • Handling it yourself makes life easier for your client.

She explained and showed what changes can be made:

  • Making PDF pages match the text pages.
  • Cropping pages to remove extra white space.
  • Changing spreads into single pages.
  • Extracting notes pages into a separate file.
  • Resaving a file to work around security settings.
  • Removing watermarks.
  • Combining chapter files into one master file.

She also explained what can’t be changed:

  • Full password protected files.
  • Removing line numbers and some watermarks.

I will focus on the next sessions of the ASI Virtual Event: Indexing Life Hacks in successive blog postings. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: E-book Indexes–More than Meets the Eye

Saturday, December 2nd, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The last session on Saturday, E-book Indexes: More than Meets the Eye, was presented by Dr. Mary Coe.  Dr. Coe took audience members in the mind’s eye of the reader when presenting her research on how people find information in e-books, then shared her recommendations on how to make e-book indexes better.

She addressed the question of what is used for index locators when there are no page numbers in an e-book with active indexes, which take the reader directly to the location of the term on which they clicked.  Should an index entry target land on a paragraph, line, or word?   Readers can get frustrated if they don’t find exactly what they want when clicking on a term in an active index.

She said that very little research has been done on the use of indexes in e-books, with studies only asking participants if they found answers to questions and not how they found their answers.  For her research, she set up a digital usability lab and gave participants tasks to explore e-book indexes.

As a result of her research, she made the following recommendations for active e-book indexes:

• make index scanning and navigating easier

• provide a link to the index from TOC or alpha navigation bars at the top to facilitate moving around the index

• match page number locators to print books if possible

• add an index icon to the toolbar or at least link the index to the TOC

• recognize how readers use an index with other tools, such as search

This concludes the blog series on the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: New A.I. Tools and Indexing

Saturday, November 4th, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The third session on Saturday, New A.I. Tools and Indexing: Do We Welcome Our Robot Overlords? was presented by John Magee, Cengage Gale’s Director of Metadata Services.  Magee focused his discussion on Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)’s current and future influence on indexing.

He described DALL-E, a generative AI technology that enables users to create new images with text to graphics prompts.  DALL-E generates the most probable input match from a database of hundreds of millions of images and captions.  John tested the generator with sample alt-text that described a photo he had taken and later with a caption from a press photo.  He concluded that DALL-E generally supports the quality of alt-text and captions but has problems with the details and the wording of the prompt.

Next, he discussed Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. These giant databases, filled with text generated by humans, are not necessarily reliable.  Large Language Models return statistically probable answers but cannot distinguish truth from fiction; hence, they are prone to hallucinations, returning fictitious/erroneous results, and plagiarism.  John gave examples of AI producing convincing abstracts of articles, however, indexes for Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and controlled vocabularies like Library of Congress subject headings, were flawed and lacked alphabetical order, locators, and included headings for persons and things that did not appear in the text.

He concluded that AI could generate impressive, convincing results, but is prone to hallucinations and errors. AI could also produce lots of text at little cost, but there are many moral, philosophical, and legal questions, especially regarding the misuse, of the technology.  While AI simulates intelligence, actual intelligence is not part of its model.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the last Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Live Indexing Demo

Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The second session on Saturday, Live Indexing Demo, was presented by Shannon Li.  Ms. Li indexed live the introduction and first chapter from a scholarly book, The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century by Jeffrey F. Hamburger.

She started by looking up the book’s description on the publisher’s website to get a sense of the metatopic.  She copied and pasted this to her indexing program to keep it on the top of her mind as she worked.  She flagged a few potential entries in the introduction but said she usually doesn’t get too many there.  She used the introduction to gain a sense of the book’s overall structure.

As she delved into Chapter 1, she scanned the section headings, but said they were too vague and likely too general to use as entries.  She selected a number of proper names as entries, copying and pasting from the PDF that she had open on the screen.  Her dedicated indexing software program was open to the right, so that she could see the progress on the index.  She also selected a number of terms, such as authority, authorship, and inspiration, and created subheadings as she worked.  Other entries included such headings as author portraits and Rhetoric (personification).

She searched for potential entries in the PDF to see how many times they occurred and if they merited breaking down into subheadings.  She flagged entries that needed further attention in different colors: red for reworking and green for possible deletion if short on space.  She made notes to herself in brackets, such as double post, reword, or add a cross-reference.  She avoided spelling errors by copying and pasting everything directly from the PDF into the indexing software.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the third Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

 

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Learning from the HarperCollins Strike

Sunday, September 3rd, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023, and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The first session on Saturday, Changing Industries from the Inside: Learning from the HarperCollins Strike, was presented by Olga Brudastova, President of Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers.  Since the beginning of the pandemic, the labor movement has seen an increased interest in unions organizing across different industries and sectors.  Recently, over 200 employees of HarperCollins Publishers went on strike for more than three months to win a fair contract.

Ms. Brudastova said that HarperCollins union workers had worked without a contract since April 2022, and that bargaining began in December 2021.  An impasse dragged on for months, with management refusing to budge on salary increases from the low of $45,000 in relation to NYC’s high housing costs.  The union requested raising salaries to $50,000.  The union authorized a strike on November 10, 2022.  With the aid of a federal mediator, a deal was finally ratified on February 16, 2023, granting the union some of what it had asked for.  Starting salaries were increased to $47,500, rising to $50,000 by 2025.  Union workers also received a lump-sum payment, and workers making under $60,000 were granted two hours of overtime per week without management approval.  The strike had an impact on the publishing industry, and the final deal was a win for nonunionized workers at other publishers, since Hachette and MacMillan announced they would increase their starting salaries.

Ms. Brudastova also discussed other fields where UAW Local 2110 is active, such as clerical workers, and her own experience organizing student workers.  She described the benefits of unionization in decreasing the power inequity between management and workers.   She outlined the shift from wage workers to freelance workers, and how this is exploitative, and how and why freelance workers should consider unionization.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the second Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

 

 

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Mapping Words–A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing

Saturday, August 5th, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023 and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The fourth session on Friday, Mapping Words: A Writer on the Mysterious World of Indexing, was presented by June Sawyers, who is both a writer and an indexer.  She focused her talk on writers who are also indexers, such as Virginia Woolf, as well as the traits writers and indexers need to possess in order to be successful.

Virginia Woolf wrote an index for her book, Orlando, with sub-entries for the character showing cross-dressing and his arch of life.  She and her husband started a literary press, Hogarth Press, to publish literary works by friends, and so she wrote indexes for these books.

Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was also a writer and an indexer.  He wrote an index for his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno.  His entries were humorous and whimsical, she said, with such subject headings as the following:

  • bed, reasons for never going to
  • sobriety, extreme inconvenience of

A contemporary writer and indexer is Larry Sweazy, who writes the murder mystery series, which includes See Also Murder.

The traits of a successful writer include:

  • read quickly and carefully
  • good communication skills
  • commitment and perseverance
  • self-motivation
  • empathy with the reader
  • work alone for long periods of time
  • detail-oriented
  • good spelling
  • grammar skills
  • good organization skills
  • think theoretically
  • wide general knowledge
  • passion for reading
  • independent

The traits of an indexer are much the same as that of a writer, except that an indexer is usually anonymous.  A novel also might take years to write, and an index has a much shorter deadline.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the first Saturday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

 

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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: The History of Stoplists

Sunday, July 2nd, 2023

The American Society for Indexing held its 2023 Virtual Conference, “The Eyes Have It: The Indexer Perspective–Past, Present & Future,” on Friday, April 28, 2023 and Saturday, April 29, 2023.  Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.

The third session on Friday, The History of Stoplists: Lists of Words Not Indexed, was presented by Bella Hass Weinberg, a Professor at St. John’s University.  Stoplists (lists of words not indexed) were thought to be developed in the 1950s in conjunction with automatic indexing.  The first Hebrew concordance (word index) to the Bible, entitled Me’ir Nativ (15th century), contained a stoplist that is similar to modern ones in that it consists of function words, such as prepositions.  Me’ir Nativ was modeled on the Latin Biblical concordance of Arlottus.

Selected words from the Hebrew stoplist of Me’ir Nativ include:

  • all                                      lest                                         thus
  • already                              maybe                                    to
  • also                                    not                                        under
  • because                             only                                       very
  • before                                or                                           was
  • between                            please                                    what
  • but                                     she                                         when
  • for                                      that                                        who
  • from                                   then                                       why
  • he                                      therefore                                with
  • how                                    these
  • if                                         this

 

She discussed theological debates over the meanings of function words and related the concept of stoplist to indexable matter.   She also described common terminology for stopwords and stoplists in search engine optimization, computing, and artificial intelligence.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the following Friday session of the ASI 2023 Virtual Conference.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.

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