Friday, June 11, 8:15 to 11:45 

Secondary Indexing—The Specifics of Managing Revisions, Cumulations, and Spin-Offs 
Frances Lennie 

Frances has been indexing for 21 years, focusing mainly on clinical and research texts in medicine, and for the last 14 years has overseen the development and distribution of CINDEX Indexing Software. She has also served as treasurer of ASI for 6 years. 

This presentation will detail choices facing indexers when they are asked to revise an index to the new edition of a publication, the cumulation of many years’ worth of annual indexes to journals, or the preparation of an index to a publication culled from an existing one. 

What Happens When You Talk to Your Computer: The Ins and Outs of Voice Recognition and What It Can and Can’t Do for an Indexer 
Larry E. Edmonson 

This presentation will have three components: (1) the mathematical/linguistic underpinning and historic development of voice recognition; (2) how voice recognition can be applied to real world indexing and other editorial world, and (3) what products are available and what are they like. 

Presenter: Larry is a lawyer by education and a writer and indexer by choice. He completed his first index nearly 30 years ago and has been using voice recognition since 1995. 

Holocaust Presentation 
Shoah Visual History Foundation 

This presentation will provide an introduction to the Shoah Foundation’s indexing methodology and will illuminate the challenges associated with indexing oral history narratives. 

Macmillan: Editorial Process 

Originally titled "A Book Is Born," this presentation will cover the developmental stages of a book from an idea to its delivery to the printer. Editorial functions and areas will be covered. The Macmillan Training Team, which has served the production department since 1995, trains new layout technicians, proofreaders, and indexers in the basic skills of their individual disciplines as well as training the company at large in a variety of soft skills.

What’s Happening in ASI 

Saturday, June 12, 8:15 to 11:45 

Index-Logic 
Michael Stelmach 

The index, long used as the primary mode of locating information within a document, is also the ideal tool to search for information across documents. We will be discussing how indexes can be parsed, loaded into relational databases, and used for searching large bodies of monographic publications. This is a particularly important direction for indexing at a time when online bookstores are offering millions of titles, libraries are forced to keep a great number of their titles off site, and books are being marketed in electronic format. 

Taking Back the Desktop 
Gregory Rawlins 

New research is leading to a view of indexing as the core activity of all actions on the desktop, allowing search and reorganization of files fetched from multiple sources (the Web, email, news, ftp) and the automatic fetching of potentially related material. This talk describes a program, written in cross-platform Java, that fetches and indexes all the data in common use by a single user to better support and recall on the desktop.

Gregory J. E. Rawlins is the author of Moths to the Flame: The Seductions of Computer Technology and Slaves of the Machine: The Quickening of Computer Technology. He is also Associate Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is currently involved in research on the problem of indexing (both the Web and the desktop) and is directing a program with 24 graduate-student programmers. The Web site for the project is http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~rawlins/website/entry.html. 

Indexing Consistency and Training in a Production Environment 
Kim Schroeder and staff 

How three people with the same training can view raw material in completely different ways and how, as a team, they reach compromise, common practices, and consistency. 

Macmillan: Embedded Indexing 

Macmillan Computer Publishing began embedding index entries in text files in 1990 when they moved from the traditional paste-up production process to desktop publishing of their computer books. This presentation will cover the process used to index books, why embedding entries has been successful, and the role indexers play in the book process. Macmillan started off with one full-time indexer and has grown to support the current staff of 16 individuals.