Speaker Biographies

Risa Stephanie Bear lives in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, and has an M.A. in English and M.S. in Museum Studies. She is the manager of the Oregon Newspaper Indexing Project in the University of Oregon Libraries and supervisor of collections and stacks in the Libraries' Document Center. She's also the publisher of Renascence Editions, an online repository of Early Modern texts, and author of several books of poems, fiction, and nonfiction.

Michael Bywater has been involved in the Starship Titanic project longer than anyone else. Since 1989 (the Summer of Synchronised Shouting and Weeping) in Juan-les-Pins, actually, when Douglas Adams first explained the idea and he said it sounded fine but hadn't a hope in hell of actually happening.

He was the original Script Editor on the project. It was a silly job-title, really. What it meant was spending the spring of 1996 sitting with Douglas on The Digital Village's agreeable sun-deck overlooking London, shouting and weeping. This was known as "the creative process" and involved making remarks like "I'll tell you a really good way to puree the flock of starlings," and "Why don't we just make them tear his head off?" and "What bloody parrot? You never mentioned a parrot," and "So, hang on, what's the objective of the game?"

He also wrote the Starship Titanic website, which is very exciting if confusing and inconclusive.

He does other things, too. Well, you'd have to, really. He's a columnist for the London Independent on Sunday and The Observer; writes about high-tech stuff for the Daily Telegraph; is cultural critic for the New Statesman; and keeps claiming to have finished a book about flying around the Australian Outback in a rickety old Cessna 182, which will be out this winter ha ha ha.

He is a pilot, harpsichordist, snappy dresser, part-time consulting physician, red-hot lover and self-deluding old goat, but what he's proudest of is playing the organ part in "A Whiter Shade of Pale" alongside Gary Brooker, who wrote the song.

Michael Bywater lives in a disintegrating 18th-century apartment in central London with a bad yellow-eyed woman, 86 pairs of spectacles, and a wardrobe of fine Savile Row suits, several of which are paid for. He owns a pair of crocodile shoes and you would know him if you saw him.

Sylvia Coates has been a full-time indexer since 1989. Her indexing experience covers a wide variety of subject matter, including the social sciences, medical texts, business, religious studies, and women's studies. Sylvia regularly works for scholarly, textbook, and trade book presses. She has written numerous publications on indexing and has taught workshops and a basic indexing course since 1990. Sylvia recently developed the UC Berkeley Extension Online Indexing: Theory and Application Course and serves as one of the course instructors.

Paul Cullum is a feature writer for the L.A. Weekly, and has written for such publications as Premiere, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and Salon. He currently writes the "Camera Obscura" column for the national bi-monthly magazine Arthur. He is the co-author, with Harry Knowles and Mark Ebner, of Ain't It Cool: Hollywood's Redheaded Stepchild Speaks Out (Warner Books 2002).

Denise Goetting is an assistant professor of library science and head of Cataloging at Edith Garland Dupré Library at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Nora Harris is a former reference librarian who has been a freelance indexer for four years. She contributes to the Librarians' Index to the Internet and has serverd as ASI co-webmaster.

Benjamin Healy compiles the "Who's Who" index in each issue of The Atlantic magazine. He will be the featured speaker at the Awards Dinner, Thursday May 12.

Kari Kells has served ASI at the national level by creating and managing the ASI Website. She was a founding member of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASI, is currently the co-mistress, and has held a variety of officer positions in that chapter. Besides her volunteer work, Kari enjoys teaching indexing through her own business, the Graduate School of the USDA, and several universities in the Pacific Northwest. Although she indexes a lot of software-oriented books, her favorite client publishes instruction manuals for firefighters. She has recently dipped her toes into creating altered books and scrapbooks and is looking forward to exploring these further now that the book she co-authored with Sherry Smith,Inside Indexing, has been published.

Anne Leach has been involved in publishing as editor and indexer since 1985 when she also first joined ASI. Over the years, she was active in the Golden Gate Chapter, and since 1988, the SoCal Chapter. She was a director of ASI for six years, editor of Key Words for six years, and headed up ASI’s Publicity Committee for two years. She was ASI's Hines Award honoree for 2003.

Fred Leise is owner and principal of Conceptual Analysis, LLC, providing consulting services in metadata design and controlled vocabulary development, as well as in information architecture in user testing. Fred has also been a freelance indexer since 1995, specializing in scholarly works in the humanities, with a focus on international relations and East Asian civilization. He and two colleagues are authors of a series of articles on controlled vocabularies and faceted classification, available at www.BoxesandArrows.com.

Frances Lennie began her indexing career in 1977, working on medical and economics texts for Holt-Saunders Publishing Co. in the United Kingdom. After her relocation to the U.S. in 1982, she continued building her indexing business while developing indexing software for private use that would later be released in 1986 as CINDEX. Her company, Indexing Research, continues to develop and maintain CINDEX and provides indexing and abstracting services in both medicine and the humanities, as well as file conversion services and software training. Fran served as treasurer for ASI from 1992 to 1998 and as ASI president 2003–2004. She is a founding fellow of the Consortium of Indexing Professionals.

Jack Lyon is the owner of The Editorium and is the managing editor of a publishing house in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been editing books for more than twenty-five years.

Seth Maislin is an independent indexing and information consultant and trainer. He teaches occasionally at Middlesex Community College and Bentley College, both in Massachusetts, as well as privately and at conferences. Seth has served continuously on the national ASI Board for over seven years and is an integral part of ASI's educational initiative team.

Kate Mertes is sole proprietor of Mertes Editorial Services. Since 1998, she has provided indexing, information retrieval, and editorial expertise for complex, challenging projects in law and the humanities. Kate took her B.A. degree in medieval studies, a Ph.D. in medieval history, and a post-doctoral degree in theology, and after teaching at the university level for several years, moved into publishing with a stint at Oxford English Dictionaries. She worked nine years as a managing editor of indexing with Research Institute of America. Kate served on the ASI Board from 1998 to 2004 and is a past president of ASI and a founding fellow of the Consortium of Indexing Professionals.

Alexandra Nickerson has been indexing since 1965. She specializes in medical and health related materials and also indexes software applications, books, cookbooks, and textbooks. She has served ASI as president 1997–1998 and as a member of the Board. She served as chair of the H.W. Wilson Award for three years, as chair of the Heartlands Chapter for one year, and as chair of the Education Committee of ASI for three years. She has been a presenter at numerous local and national ASI meetings as well as many national meetings of writers and editors.

Deborah Patton has been a freelance indexer since 1994. She majored in political science. After graduating she was hired by a Washington, DC, think-tank company. Work with other public policy and government analysis publishers soon followed. She lives near Baltimore with her husband who works for the federal government.

Janet Perlman has more than 25 years of experience in indexing. Her company, Southwest Indexing, specializes in scientific and engineering materials, and also provides indexing services for Spanish-language materials. Janet has been active in ASI at both state and national levels. She is the editor of Running An Indexing Business and has given workshops on business aspects of indexing practice and quality in indexing. Janet has served on the judging panel for the H.W. Wilson Award for Excellence in Indexing and chaired that committee in 2004.

David 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. Dave 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 his earliest assignments 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. Currently, indexing projects center around integrating Indexing Research's CINDEX into corporate and governmental publishing operations, including web applications.

Gale Rhoades, in addition to being the North American publisher of the Macrex Indexing Program, is a consultant who specializes in making the use of computers more like toasting bread than rocket science. She developed many of her skills and techniques during the ten years she served as the Executive Director of the nonprofit Fog International Computer Users Group; in addition to coordinating the activities of volunteers and employees there, she often acted as the teacher who manages to stay just one step ahead of the students. Since 1991 she has been self-employed, working with individuals, small businesses, and municipalities; her client base now extends far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area in which she lives.

Carol Roberts has been indexing since 1993, primarily scholarly books in the humanities, including philosophy. She currently holds the position of Secretary on ASI's Board of Directors. She has two master's degrees in philosophy, one from State University of New York at Albany and one from Cornell University.

Kay Schlembach, presenting BASIC INDEXING for the ninth year, has been called a "marvelous, vivacious speaker." Coming from a diverse background including home schooling and real estate appraisal, Kay has been a full-time indexer since 1997. She believes in service, and is currently an ASI Director, working on ASI's distance learning initiatives, while remaining actively involved with the South Central Chapter. She credits her students for the continued success of BASIC INDEXING.

Galen Schroeder, the proprietor of Dakota Indexing, indexes books, journals/periodicals, Websites, and technical manuals. With a background in product development, manufacturing, and marketing, he specializes in indexing business, environment, history, and reference materials.

Scott Smiley took the plunge into indexing in 1999 after completing his doctorate in geography. Using CINDEX for Macintosh and drawing from the broad knowledge base of his studies in the field of geography and beyond, he indexes books in a variety subjects, including public policy, environmental studies, social sciences, business, education, communications, and the humanities. Scott lives outside of Portland, Oregon and is treasurer of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASI, as well a co-coordinator for the Portland Peer Review group. For more info you may visit his website, "Ideas in Place".

Sherry Smith has been a freelance indexer since 1996. Political science and public policy are two of her subject specialties. Serendipity played a key role in turning this long-time general interest into an area of expertise. Her first marketing efforts were aimed at publishers who specialized in economics and business. One of those publishers hired her to index a political science book. The successful completion of that project created numerous opportunities to index this endlessly fascinating subject called "politics". Sherry also teaches indexing classes, has worked in numerous volunteer positions in the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASI since 1997 and is currently serving as the co-president. She co-authored the recently published Inside Indexing with Kari Kells. She lives on the dry side of Oregon's Cascade Mountains where she hikes with a camera during her time away from the computer.

Jeffrey Sowder has been Director of Content Management, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, since 2001. He was previously Metadata Manager at Questia.com and Digital Resources Librarian at Columbia University.

Louise Spiteri is Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, Dalhousie University. Dr. Spiteri teaches in the areas of cataloging, indexing, abstracting, and thesaurus construction. Her research focus is upon faceted classification systems and the design and evaluation of information-retrieval thesauri.

Margie Towery has been an indexer for over a decade and was an editor for many years before that. Her B.A. and M.A. in history are from the University of Illinois at Springfield. Margie's indexing focus is on scholarly books. She is the editor of Indexing Specialties: History (1998) andIndexing Specialties: Scholarly Books (2005) as well as the indexer of the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. Her cumulative index ofThe Letters of Matthew Arnold won the H.W. Wilson Award in 2002.

Krista Wall is the Publishing Services Manager for Microsoft Learning. She has managed indexers, index production, and index processes for more than seven years. Prior to working for Microsoft, Krista was the managing editor for a legal publisher.

Carolyn Weaver, owner of Weaver Indexing Service, Bellevue, Washington, has been a freelance indexer since 1991, specializing in health and social sciences books and journals. She was an academic health librarian (as well as a moonlighting indexer) in Washington, Nebraska, and Illinois, before moving to full-time indexing in 2000. She is a former Treasurer of ASI, current President of the Pacific Northwest Chapter, and Web master for the Business Indexing SIG, and has written articles for various ASI publications.

Martin White has been an indexer since 1982. His formal education is in mathematics and philosophy, both of which he considers excellent preparation for indexing. He began his indexing career with Encyclopedia Britannica, working as an indexer, indexing supervisor, and in thesaurus development. The index for Children's Britannica, for which he was index supervisor, was a runner-up for the Wheatley Medal of the Society of Indexers (UK). He has been a freelance indexer since 1990, full-time since 1995. He specializes in scholarly books, but also indexes trade books, textbooks, and medical journals. His index for John Patrick Diggin's The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority received ASI's 1995 H. W. Wilson Award for Excellence in Indexing.

L. Pilar Wyman is a freelance indexer in Annapolis, MD. Pilar holds a B.A. from St. John's College and completed two years of graduate study in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. She started indexing in 1983 for Maria Coughlin and set up her own freelance book indexing business in 1990. She is the editor of Indexing Specialties: Medicine (1999). Presently she is the editor of ASI's newsletter, Key Words.

Enid Zafran is the owner of Indexing Partners, LLC, which specializes in legal indexing as well as other topics such as public policy, art, history, psychology, and education. She is the President of ASI (2004–2005) and a founding member of the Consortium of Indexing Professionals. She has given numerous presentations at ASI conferences both nationally and locally. She has edited Starting an Indexing Business (1998) andIndexing Specialties: Scholarly Books (2005).