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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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, ergonomics, Virtual Conference, work habits
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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 2023 Virtual Conference: Learning from the HarperCollins Strike

Sunday, September 3rd, 2023

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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, HarperCollins, publishing, strikes, unions, Virtual Conference
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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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, book indexing, indexers, Virtual Conference, writers
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: The History of Stoplists

Sunday, July 2nd, 2023

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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, stoplists, stopwords, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: How and When to Hire Someone to Edit or Proofread Your Indexes

Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

The second session on Friday, Another Set of Eyes: How and When to Hire Someone to Edit or Proofread Your Indexes, was presented by Michelle Guiliano. She discussed her relationship with index editor Laurie Hlavaty. Her experience with index edits originated from subcontract work, and with an editor who specialized in scientific and medical texts, then with an indexer who also provides editing and proofreading services. She found that since she was going over and over her indexes before submitting them, that having index evaluations with feedback would be beneficial.

Types of index edits:

indexing skills evaluation with feedback
proofreading
- She said it is helpful to have another set of eyes going over your index.
editing
- This checks structural issues, word choice, metadata, main headings, cross-references, double-posts, and page references. Editing also checks for clarity and conciseness.
proofreading and editing
- She said that this is the ideal situation.
peer reviews vs. index edits
- She said that peer reviews are not a substitute for index edits.

She outlined the downsides–the cost of paying for the index edits, the time working the index edit into your schedule, the time reworking the index after the edit, and the upfront investment. Then she weighed them with the upsides–time of cushion built into indexing schedule, as well as forced distance from index, cost as tax-deductible, efficiency, quality of reader’s perspective, catching mistakes, and improved indexing process, and peace of mind.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, index editing, proofreading, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2023 Virtual Conference: Metadata at The New York Times

Sunday, May 7th, 2023

The first session on Friday, Metadata at The New York Times: Organizing and Leveraging News Content from 1851-Today, was presented by Senior Taxonomist Jennifer Parrucci. She showed how The New York Times is ahead of the curve when it comes to metadata and how that legacy has turned into a thorough process for content classification. She also outlined how The Times leverages this metadata to push content to consumers, pull analytics and make sure things are easily findable in the archive.

She explained that clippings of newspaper articles and photos were kept in the Morgue in the basement of the newspaper building. These were pasted to a card and kept in a card catalog to be searched. The New York Times Index, a red reference book, was published from 1913 through 2017. The index includes articles from the first issue in 1851 on. Later, the newspaper could be searched by microfilm or microfiche. Times Tags have been used for The Times website in the present.

Times Tags

Controlled vocabulary based off of the original index terms.
Named entities (over a million) of people, places, organizations, and titles
Subjects ~5,000. These include semantic relations, broad, narrow and related terms and scope notes, and news events.
Assigned to all published assets.
Rule-based software
- Entity extraction: normalization, disambiguation
  - Normalization example of choosing just one spelling for Qaddafi, Muammer el-
  - Disambiguation example of distinguishing between different names: Brown, Michael DeWayne (1954-) by adding certain subject words
- Categorization: frequency, proximity, placement
Do not tag peripheral mentions, figurative language, historical references, spokespersons, people quoted

Tags are used today for Collections/Topics, Daily Email Recommendations for readers, Advertising, Search, and Audience Analytics.

The Archives go back to 1851. The Times Machine is a tool for subscribers that is a digital microfiche, that is searchable and gives a link to buy reprints. She highlighted some challenges with the Archives:

Ambiguous names and clashes in archives.
Offensive and outdated index terms in archives. Need to update, without sanitizing history.
Problem digitizing list with label name as identifier.
Index knowledge passed down as apprenticeship. Problem knowing what something was called without scope notes. For example, Watergate.

In the next blog posting, I will discuss the next 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.

Tags:American Society for Indexing, archives, metadata, newspaper indexing, The New York Times, Virtual Conference
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ASI 2022 Virtual Conference: Upcycling Last Edition’s Index

Wednesday, November 2nd, 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.

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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