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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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, book indexing, indexing, notes, Virtual Event
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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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, indexing, project tracking, Virtual Event
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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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, e-books, indexing, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: New A.I. Tools and Indexing

Saturday, November 4th, 2023

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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, DALL-E, indexing, Large Language Models, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Live Indexing Demo

Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, book indexing, indexing, live demo, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2022 Virtual Conference: EPUB is Essential

Sunday, December 4th, 2022

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.

The final session on Saturday, EPUB is Essential–It’s for more than just trade books, featured keynote speakers, Bill Kasdorf and Caroline Desrosiers, CEO and Founder of Scribely. Kasdorf discussed EPUB, which has become virtually the universal format for providing trade and scholarly books as ebooks. The latest version is EPUB3.

A fundamental reason for this shift is that EPUB 3 has become the standard format for accessibility. It follows the same standards for accessibility that web technologies have, which are designed to enable content to be accessible to people with visual, physical, or cognitive disabilities like blindness, low vision, and dyslexia. Properly structured and coded EPUBs are “born accessible,” which are better for everybody.

Proper EPUBs have page break markers in the HTML to mark where each page in the print book begins and which provide the page numbers. The metadata has a required property for identifying the exact print edition to which the page break markers correspond. Publishers just need to link the locators in the index to those page break markers, which should become a standard requirement.

EPUBs often lack image descriptions, and alt text, if present, is rarely done properly. The description isn’t just what an image is a picture of; it needs to convey to a print disabled user what the image conveys to a sighted user. Indexers would be ideal writers of image descriptions, because it requires analyzing and understanding the content, and then expressing it at a granular level. Desrosiers discussed the principles of writing good alt text and extended descriptions, with concrete examples.

This concludes the blog series on 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.

Tags:accessiblity, eBooks, EPUB, EPUB 3, images, indexing
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ASI 2022 Virtual Conference: Upcycling Last Edition’s Index

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022

In the third session on Saturday, Using a Classic to Create a Contemporary Masterpiece, Maria Sullivan presented on how to upcycle the last edition’s index to create the index for a new edition. Indexers are often asked to create an index for a subsequent edition of a publication. The client asks to base the index for the new edition on the index for the previous edition. Indexers often think that starting from scratch will yield better results. Sullivan, however, said that reusing a well-constructed index to an older edition offers significant benefits, such as data entry efficiency and format consistency across a series of publications.

Ideal candidates for index recycling include structured publications with consistent formats, such as textbooks, law books, manuals and handbooks, reference books, encyclopedias, and loose-leaf services. The common characteristic of these publications is that much of the terminology remains unchanged, so that the headings and cross-references of the prior index can be reused by importing the prior index as a plain text or XML file into indexing software.

Criteria to consider in deciding whether to recycle the previous index include the extent of page reflow, whether the new index requires minor additions with scattered changes or a general index update, or whether terms should be combined for a cumulative index. The first step in recycling is a thorough vetting of the previous index to see how well it is structured. The old index should be dissected to identify changes in pagination and relocation of material, and to determine the extent of the new material. She keeps separate files for each part, section, and chapter, and compares old to new, then decides how much of the index to reuse. She recommends frequent backups of the index file at every stage while updating.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the last 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.

Tags:book indexing, indexing, recycling, upcycling, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2022 Virtual Conference: Indexing Children’s Books

Monday, October 3rd, 2022

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.

Tags:book indexing, children's books, indexing, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2022 Virtual Conference: Indexing the Metatopic

Sunday, September 4th, 2022

In the first session on Saturday, Indexing the Metatopic–Bridging the Gap Across the Pond, presenter Melanie Gee discussed contradictory practices in the US and the UK of indexing the metatopic: always index the metatopic comprehensively, or never index the metatopic (or if you must, only sparsely). In her presentation, she referred to the stereotype of tea drinkers, UK, who never index the metatopic, and the coffee drinkers, US, who always index the metatopic. Based on a survey she conducted with about sixty respondents, she found that practices in both the US and UK are actually quite similar.

She explained that the metatopic is the overarching, main topic of the book. She said that identifying the metatopic will help you understand the structure and argument of the book. Every entry in the book is structurally related to the metatopic.

A majority of survey respondents answered that they indexed the metatopic for the last three books they indexed, with slightly more on the US side. The most common response from UK indexers about not indexing the metatopic was concern about the metatopic being too broad and not wanting to index the whole book at the entry. US indexers were mostly more concerned about the lack of general information about the metatopic and including only specific, chapter-level topics.

She then discussed different types of metatopics, such as simple, multiple, multifaceted, nebulous, and clustered metatopics, and reviewed methods for handling them in the index.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the second 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.

Tags:book indexing, indexing, metatopic, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2022 Virtual Conference: Improving Your Index Editing Process

Thursday, August 4th, 2022

In the fourth session on Friday, Fred Leise presented Laying the Ground for the Future: Improving Your Index Editing Process. This presentation covered the steps in a simple yet exhaustive index editing process that cuts down on hours of unnecessary work.

Fred shared some of the ways he works when building an index to make editing more efficient. Fred indexes in heading/subheading pairs to provide context to an entry during the creation of an index. Markers such as ## or XXX, which he uses during entry selection, help him address issues without losing time.

Fred makes a half dozen or so passes through an index in the editing process. He reduces that by batching tasks where logical.

Here is Fred’s recommended editing sequence:

Review and adjust marked items.
Normalize entries. Look for entries with five or fewer locators. Collapse subheadings and move to main heading.
Adjust the index length.
Review all main headings. The next pass is to read and edit main headings one by one.
Review all subheadings. During this pass, check for parallel structure, clarity and conciseness, and grammatical and mechanical consistency. He checks for a clear relationship to the main heading and may combine similar subheadings.
Review all cross references. Verify all targets and that the format is the same.
Review locators. Look for both long strings of undifferentiated locators–adding appropriate subheadings–and headings with unruly locators. He checks that no locators go beyond the final page of the text and looks for overlapping pages and ranges. Check for formatting of special designations and that locators have been correctly conflated.
Complete a general edit. Verify alphabetization style (letter by letter or word by word), check spelling, and check that index format and style elements match the publisher’s style sheet.
Do a final read through. Read every single word.

In the next blog posting I will discuss the first 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.

Tags:book indexing, editing, indexing, Virtual Conference
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