2009 Annual Conference

Scaling the Heights

Speaker Biographies

Victoria Agee is Director of Agee Indexing Services in Houston, TX. She has worked for public, university, and special libraries, and has had indexing contracts with the Congressional Research Service, the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the Smithsonian Institution. She has over 35 years of experience working in libraries and doing back-of-the-book, database, and periodical indexing for corporate, trade, and university publishers. She is an active member of the Special Libraries Association, the American Medical Writers Association, and the American Society for Indexing. She is currently teaching the University of California Berkeley Extension course, “Theory and Application of Indexing.”

Jenny Benevento is a librarian who is currently the Controlled Vocabulary Developer at the Associated Press. She has worked in public, academic, and special libraries in most departments and currently runs an information consulting business called Bento Information Consulting.

Joan Blanchard is an Information Management Officer with Parliamentary Publications of Canada’s House of Commons. She is responsible for the analysis of high-level Parliamentary information and the implementation of information management tools and systems to provide clients with reliable and comprehensive access to parliamentary documents.

Sylvia Coates has been a full-time indexer since 1989 specializing in scholarly indexing but also working with textbook and tradebook publishers. She was one of the USDA instructors from 1998 to 2002. In 2004 she developed and began teaching the UC Berkeley Extension indexing course.

Suzanne Fass is an indexer, copy editor, and proofreader specializing in culinary works. Her indexes range from Betty Crocker Quick and Easy Cookbook to the third edition of CIA [Culinary Institute of America] Techniques of Healthy Cooking. A graduate of New York Restaurant School, she has cooked professionally and is an avid home cook and reader with a collection of more than 900 culinary books. Suzanne also wrote an essay for the forthcoming Indexing Specialties: Culinary and Cookbooks.

Mary Harper, Access Points Indexing, has been indexing since 2004.

Nancy Humphreys holds a master’s degree in economics from University of Wisconsin—Madison. After graduation she worked briefly for Merrill Lynch, at the same Oakland (CA) office where Suze Orman got her start in. Suze got a lot richer, but Nancy shares Suze’s zeal to help other people avoid suffering from financial mistakes. Nancy’s first full-time jobs were in inventory management and cost accounting. After graduate school, Nancy earned a master of librarianship degree from the University of South Carolina—Columbia. She worked as a business librarian for 20 years before retiring and starting her own indexing business, Wordmaps Indexing, now 18 years strong.

Cheryl Landes, an award-winning technical writer, is the owner of Tabby Cat Communications in Seattle. She has more than 17 years of experience as an indexer and a technical writer in several industries: computer software, marine transportation, manufacturing, and the trade press. She is the past president of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the American Society for Indexing (PNW/ASI) and is active in the Society for Technical Communication on the chapter and international levels. She speaks frequently at ASI and STC meetings throughout the United States and Canada.

Fred Leise is currently president of the American Society for Indexing, on whose board he served two previous terms. He has worked as a freelance indexer since 1995, specializing in scholarly works in the humanities, including East Asian history and civilization, international relations, and politics. His index to Art and Affection: A Biography of Virginia Woolf by Panthea Reid was one of three works shortlisted for the 1998 ASI/H.W. Wilson Company Indexing Award. He has written and spoken extensively on controlled vocabularies and indexing; he recently coauthored Indexing for Editors and Authors: A Practical Guide to Understanding Indexes, published last year by Information Today, Inc. Fred is a coeditor and also wrote an essay for the forthcoming Indexing Specialties: Culinary and Cookbooks.

Frances S. Lennie works in many different subject areas creating indexes for monographs, multi-volume works, and serial publications, and her ongoing involvement in the development, marketing and support of CINDEX™ exposes her to many different index types and styles, both print and electronic. After a 7-year interlude in New York City, she and her husband have returned upstate to Rochester. Frances also wrote an essay for the forthcoming Indexing Specialties: Culinary and Cookbooks.

Seth Maislin is a managing partner of Potomac Indexing, an indexing and information services firm, and an independent consultant in information architecture and taxonomy specializing in the construction of usable Web-based hierarchies, knowledge retrieval systems, and indexes. He also served on ASI’s national board for 10 consecutive years, culminating with his presidency starting in 2006. Seth is an adjunct instructor at three Massachusetts colleges and two private companies, and the author of an online course on indexing books and websites. Notable clients include Caterpillar, Converse, Lycos, MIT, Mercedes Benz USA, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, and the United Nations; his publishing clients are too numerous to mention. He is currently working on a textbook. Seth has two young children (3 and 4), and lives and works near Boston, MA.

Julie McClung is an experienced indexer of parliamentary debates at the British Columbia Legislative Assembly and has presented at ISC and ASI conferences on parliamentary indexing and controlled vocabulary.

Max McMaster has been a freelance indexer for the past 16 years working predominantly on back-of-book indexing but delving into database indexing, journal indexing, newspaper indexing and Web-indexing as well. He arrived at indexing after spending 19 years in the library and information fields, mainly involved with scientific disciplines in government organizations. He has in excess of 1,650 indexes to his name. Max lectures on indexing to editing and publishing students and technical communicators at a number of Australian universities. He also runs indexing training courses for the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) and other organizations throughout Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. He was chairman of the Panel of Assessors of ANZSI for 5 years. Max has been fortunate to have been awarded the prestigious Australian Society of Indexers Medal (now called ANZSI Medal) for back-of-book indexing on three occasions. Further information about Max can be obtained from his website www.masterindexing.com

David K. Ream is Leverage Technologies’ chief consultant for publishers. He has a B.S. in Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University. Mr. Ream has spent over 30 years working with publishers in the areas of typesetting design and production, database creation, editorial systems, and electronic publication design and production. One of Mr. Ream’s earliest assignments (in the mid-seventies) involved creating custom programs to sort legal indexes into locator order and then back into alpha order. Since then he has worked on many indexing, abstracting, and thesaurus projects and systems. Currently, indexing projects center around integrating Indexing Research’s Cindex into corporate and governmental publishing operations including web applications. LevTech also performs computer consulting and programming for editorial applications as well batch composition services.

Alice Redmond-Neal is the in-house specialist in thesaurus construction and knowledge base development for Access Innovations, Inc. Her work in psychology, linguistics, and communication disorders transferred well to the field of information sciences. Alice has created numerous thesauri on topics ranging from general information to highly technical subject matter. As Access Innovations’ Training Director, Alice is responsible for coaching clients in the use of Data Harmony software. Alice has written on thesaurus construction and categorization and has presented workshops and lectures at several conferences.

Since 2005, Chip Reese has indexed numerous books on Middle East conflict, al Qaeda, domestic terrorism, and global jihad. He’s not sure if his numerous Internet searches on the subject have landed him on any watch lists.

Martine Rocheleau is an Authority List Specialist with Parliamentary Publications of Canada’s House of Commons. She is responsible for the development, implementation, management, and maintenance of bilingual Information Management tools and controlled vocabularies that support access and retrieval of Parliamentary Information.

Author of The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago, Carol Fisher Saller is a senior manuscript editor and assistant managing editor at the University of Chicago Press. Since its creation in 1997, she has been the editor of the monthly Q&A for The Chicago Manual of Style Online.

June Sawyers is the author or editor of 18 books. In between book contracts, she indexes trade and scholarly books.

Kay Schlembach has been passionate about teaching beginning indexers for over a decade. A “marvelous, vivacious teacher,” Kay is a partner with Potomac Indexing, LLC, and served as an ASI director, and ASI Training Course committee member and evaluator. Coming from a diverse background including homeschooling gifted children and real estate appraisal, Kay has been a full-time indexer since 1997.

Kamm Schreiner is the owner of SKY Software and a graduate of Virginia Tech. He is also the programmer for SKY Index Professional. He has presented workshops on using SKY Index for most of the annual ASI conferences since SKY Index Professional was released. He is a member of the American Society for Indexing and is an amateur musician and songwriter in his spare time.

Thérèse Shere has been a freelance book indexer for 11 years. She is a generalist, but frequently indexes books on environmental and natural history topics. She has developed and taught indexing workshops on cookbooks and plant names, and presented an earlier version of this workshop at ISC/SCI’s 2008 national conference. She coauthored an article on plant names for the ASI publication Index It Right! Advice from the Experts (2005), and is the author of an article on indexing recipe titles in the forthcoming ASI title Indexing Specialties: Culinary and Cookbooks. She lives in Sonoma County, CA.

Maria A. Sullivan is a freelance indexer providing technical support services to Indexing Research. She lives and works in Rochester, NY.

Margie Towery has worked in the publishing field for over 20 years. For the last 15 years, she has focused on indexing scholarly texts. She won the H.W. Wilson Award for Excellence in Indexing in both 2002 and 2008. She has edited two of ASI’s Indexing Specialties books: History and Scholarly Books (with Enid Zafran). The latter includes Towery's essay, “The Quality of a Scholarly Index.” Her recent article, “A Joycean Usability Experiment,” was published in both Key Words and The Indexer. Margie also wrote an essay for the forthcoming Indexing Specialties: Culinary and Cookbooks.

Madge Walls was a top-producing realtor on Maui and director of sales for a homebuilder in Colorado Springs until she was laid off in the recent market downturn. Her real love is literature, both reading and writing. So when she heard about indexing as a career and realized she could do it in her pajamas, the die was cast. Within two years she was self-supporting, thanks to all that she had learned about sales and marketing in the real estate business. Making a plan and executing it brought immediate business. She goes back to the plan whenever assignments run low, which rarely happens any more.

Pilar Wyman is a professional freelance indexer and has been writing indexes for over 18 years. She has written over 900 indexes for print and multimedia, for English- and Spanish-language materials. Her areas of expertise include medical and technical subjects. She edited the ASI book Indexing Specialties: Medicine, frequently consults on indexing, teaches the USDA Applied Indexing course, and, when her schedule permits, provides training and presentations on indexing and related topics. When not indexing, Pilar works as a computer teacher and technical coordinator at a private K-12 school in Annapolis, MD.

Enid L. Zafran has been indexing since 1975 and is president of Indexing Partners, LLC located in Rehoboth Beach, DE. She chairs ASI’s Publications Committee, and serves as secretary on the ASI Board. She has presented at numerous indexer, librarian, and lawyer conferences and holds a master’s degree in library science, J.D., and master's of labor law. Her business, Indexing Partners, met more than 290 deadlines in 2007. Enid trains and uses subcontractors on subjects ranging from law and public policy to art and history. Her clients include museums as well as packagers and publishers in the field of art books.

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