The American Society for Indexing held its 2022 Virtual Conference, “The Future of Indexing: A Mix of Art and Technology,” on Friday, April 29, 2022 and Saturday, April 30, 2022. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In the second session on Saturday, Indexing Children’s Books: The Future is Now!, presenter Connie Binder explored the art of indexing children’s books. She described the different age levels of children’s books and the depth of index required for each. She pointed out that indexes in children’s books serve as much to educate young readers about indexes as they do to help them locate specific information.
Focusing on the indexing process and best practices, she discussed publisher guidelines, which determine the size and depth of the index and what is indexed. Indexers can save time by determining the average number of entries per page given the maximum index size. She discussed the use (or not) of cross-references, double posting, and subentries, as well as over/underindexing.
She also covered the business aspects of indexing children’s books, getting jobs, keeping overhead low, and ensuring job security by creating lifelong index users.
In the next blog posting I will discuss the third Saturday session of the ASI 2022 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.