Opportunities in Indexing

Events - Schedule

8:00 - Continental breakfast and get-acquainted time

8:30 - Editing Technical Indexes for Usability.

• Lori Lathrop teaches indexing workshops across North America for The Society for Technical Communication as well as for ASI. Her indexing clients include major publishers and high tech companies. A technical writer and professional indexer with more than 16 years' experience, Lori is also the author of An Indexer's Guide to the Internet.

10:00 - Coffee break and more networking time

10:30 - Indexing of periodicals compared to books

• Susan Klement pioneered as a freelance librarian in Toronto from 1969 to 1991. She offered indexing, consulting, and information brokerage to business, government, professional, and academic clients world-wide. Susan was co-director of a project to index provincial statutes, indexed the Canadian Bank Act and several other complex monographs, and indexed newspapers and business periodicals weekly for many years. She was the Canadian representative to an ISO (International Organisation for Standardization) committee working to revise the standard on indexing.
  
  Susan has taught more than 20 courses in indexing and other library science subjects. Susan was a founding member of IASC and is one of its past presidents. A frequent speaker, Susan Klement has also published often in the library literature and elsewhere. Active in several professional associations, she received two Canadian awards for her achievements.

11:30 - Vocabulary control for indexing of periodicals

• Bonny McLaughlin, Editor of Higher Education Abstracts, "inherited" a controlled vocabulary from a former editor 12 years ago. Since then, the content of Higher Education Abstracts has increased by 75 percent, and Bonny has struggled to update and maintain the currency of the vocabulary in the rapidly changing field of higher education. In addition to her editorial role, Bonny has been a freelance indexer for some 15 years, specializing in scholarly books for university presses but also indexing such diverse materials as genealogy periodicals and a CD-ROM nursing database.

12:00 - Lunch and roundtable discussions

1:30 - Using the Internet and the World Wide Web as resources for indexing.

• Lynn Moncrief and Janet Perlman. Lynn Moncrief is the founder of TECHindex & Docs, specializing in technical and scientific indexing. In earlier incarnations, she was a US Navy electronics technician, then a technical writer. As an indexer, her favorite topics include computers (software, networks, programming, and online communications), electronics, physics, naval platforms and weapons systems, and cytobiology. She also does Windows (as in embedding indexes in FrameMaker and MS Word). Her clients include software companies and major and small publishers. For ASI she chairs the ASI Web Executive Committee and serves as secretary of the Southern California Chapter. Despite having been called a "gearhead" by a former physics professor, she does venture into right-brained activities when not indexing, such as surfing the Web, drawing in charcoals, and playing keyboard and drums.
  
  Janet Perlman of Southwest Indexing counts among her clients authors, publishers, book packagers, and professional organizations. Janet's specialty is the sciences physics, biology, engineering, and medicine but she always welcomes and enjoys indexing social sciences books as a change of pace. In her travels from part-timer to full-time indexer, Janet credits her participation in an online service as instrumental to her success.

2:30 - Another coffee break and more networking time

3:15 Marketing your indexing services

• Anne Leach began her indexing business in 1985 as a favor to a friend who needed an index. Within a few months, she had gained enough clients to work full-time at indexing . She's been a full-time freelancer ever since.
  
  As a result of her continued involvement in ASI, where a new indexer's first question is "How can I find clients?," she has maintained an interest in the techniques of marketing indexing services, editing the ASI publication Marketing Your Indexing Services. Anne was also active on ASI's Public Relations Committee for three years. She notes, "Even experienced indexers may want a change of scene and to expand into new specialties, and will ask the perennial question: `How can I find clients?'"

received Friday January 05, 1995 through Business Librarians Listserv posted Sunday January 07, 1995
from--Linda R-B lrudell@netcom.com

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