Speaker Biographies

Heather Hedden

Heather Hedden is the information taxonomist at Viziant Corporation, where she creates taxonomies for enterprise and government search. Previously, through her own business of Hedden Information Management, she did a variety of contract taxonomy projects in addition to freelance indexing. Prior to that, she worked nine years as a controlled vocabulary editor at the periodical and reference database publisher, Gale/Information Access Company.

Heather has given numerous conference workshops and presentations on indexing and taxonomies. She is the author of Indexing Specialties: Web Sites and is currently working on a second book on taxonomies. Heather is the founder and current manager of the Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies SIG of ASI, a past manager of the Web Indexing SIG, and past president of the New England Chapter of ASI.

Terri Hudoba

Terri Hudoba is a self-taught indexer who has been freelancing since 1990. A native of the Minneapolis (MN) area, she began her indexing career as a subcontractor working with 8 others on a multiyear project to reindex Minnesota Statutes from scratch. Since then, she has worked on projects singly and via ad hoc partnerships and has occasionally subcontracted out projects to others. Her subject specialties include law, business and finance, local history, and general humanities subjects. Over the past 3 years, she's met 60+ deadlines annually.

Terri is a member of the ASI Board and chairs the Bylaws and SIG Guidelines Review committees. She also provides editing and proofreading services.

Chuck Knapp

Chuck Knapp is the indexing manager for the Legal Services Publishing Group and Tax Management at BNA, a news and information service. He has been in BNA's indexing department for fifteen years. He oversees publication of indexes and finding aids for print and electronic products that cover subjects ranging from bankruptcy to intellectual property law. Previously, he was the indexer for U.S. Law Week, Supreme Court Today, and he created the index for BNA's Health Law & Business Series that won the American Association of Law Libraries' 1997 Best New Product award.

He authored the chapter on indexing court cases for the book Indexing Specialties: Law (Peter Kendrick and Enid L. Zafran eds., American Society of Indexers 2001). He is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma School of Law, and grew up in Kansas and Texas.

Cheryl Landes

Cheryl Landes 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. For the past six and a half years, she has worked as a technical writer for Phoenix Controls Corporation in Acton, MA. She worked onsite for five years and has worked remotely from the Pacific Northwest for the past year and a half.

She is the incoming president of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the American Society for Indexing (PNW/ASI) and 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.

Cheryl has self-published one book, Those Wild Northwest Days (Trafford Publishing, 2006) and is working on two others: Hot Lake: Healing Waters of Ea-Kesh-Pa and What can I do on Staten Island? Both of the new books are expected to be published in 2008.

Frances S. Lennie

Frances is the owner of Indexing Research, a full-service indexing company, and the developer of CINDEX, now celebrating 22 years of operation. She has served on ASI's national board as treasurer and as president, and currently is chair of ASI's Training Committee.

Julie McClung

Julie McClung is a senior indexer for Hansard Services at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. She made a joint presentation with fellow indexer Laura Kotler on Parliamentary Indexing at the 2006 ASI/ISC conference in Toronto.

Janet Perlman

Janet has more than 25 years of experience in indexing. As sole proprietor of Southwest Indexing she specializes in indexing scientific and engineering materials and textbooks, and also provides indexing services for Spanish-language materials. Janet has served ASI in many capacities at both national and chapter level and is the winner of its 2006 Hines Award. She has written and given workshops on business aspects of an indexing practice and quality in indexing.

The ASI Training in Indexing Course is now nearly two years old; Janet has been the Course Administrator for the course since its inception.

David K. Ream

Mr. 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.

Mr. Ream can be reached by e-mail at DaveReam@LevTechInc.com or by visiting the LevTech web site at www.LevTechInc.com.

Chip (Carroll) Reese

Chip Reese has worked in Rehoboth, Delaware with Indexing Partners since 2006. He has developed indexing art books and catalogues as a specialty. Most recently he has indexed for exhibits at the National Maritime Museum, Yale Center for British Art, Bard Center for Studies in Decorative Arts, and the Austin House, Hartford, Connecticut.

Gale P. Rhoades

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 was often the teacher who managed 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. Indexers, and especially Macrex users, often benefit from her extensive (and freely shared) knowledge of hardware, software, and peripherals.

She offers four principles for successful computer usage: Try before you buy; backups are only needed when they don't exist; if you can't solve a problem in five minutes, seek assistance; and, the only 'dumb' question is the one not asked.

LaSheita Sayer

LaSheita Sayer is the Founder of ZoZo Group, LLC, a full-service marketing and search-engine agency in Aurora, Colorado. She is a graduate of the Business School at the University of Colorado at Denver and the Grenoble Graduate School of Business located in France. She is an experienced marketer with over 15 years marketing experience in various industries, including high technology, insurance, and legal services.

LaSheita develops strategic marketing plans for ZoZo Group clients to meet their business development, marketing, and branding goals. Under her direction, persuasive marketing campaigns are implemented and small businesses grow.

As a member of the American Marketing Association and SEMPO, she maintains current knowledge on the latest marketing and search-engine developments for ZoZo Group clientele. She enjoys the challenge of translating technical or sophisticated legalese into messages easily understood by the general population.

In her spare time, LaSheita uses opportunities within the community to contribute to its success. She enjoys volunteering with the American Civil Liberties Union and its activities with Colorado's youth and spends one Saturday per month serving the City of Aurora as a Judicial Performance Commissioner and on the Cultural Affairs Committee. She has also been a guest speaker with the Colorado Bar Association, Denver's KLDC Radio Business show, and Denver's AALI - African American Leadership Institute as a marketing communications professional.

Kay Schlembach

Kay Schlembach is passionate about teaching beginning indexers, which she has done for over a decade. A "marvelous, vivacious teacher", Kay is a partner with Potomac Indexing, LLC, 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

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.

Noalani Terry

Noalani Terry of Whole Life Indexing & Energy Works in Montrose, Colorado, is a Registered Polarity Practitioner as well as an indexer. (In fact, polarity has been called an "index to the energy fields of the body.") She has practiced polarity since completing the 650-hour program at the New Mexico Academy of Healing Arts in 1994–1995.

Noalani has done back-of-the-book indexing since 2001 and has years of experience in library organization, thesaurus-building, and setting up and maintaining bibliographic databases. Her first indexing job was analyzing history and natural history periodicals for a public library, then typing the relevant Library of Congress subject headings on catalog cards.

Caryl Wenzel

After being a part-time freelancer for nearly 20 years, Carol morphed her part-time business into full-time after a mass layoff at the Black Dot Group in March 2006. Caryl provides complete editorial services (editing, indexing, proofreading, and writing) to a variety of textbook and trade clients—primarily elementary, high school, and college textbooks and journals. Her business plan is concentrated in the disciplines of math, science, medicine, language arts, and education, although other disciplines are considered on a case-by-case basis.

Prior to March 2006, Caryl was a project manager/editor at the Black Dot Group, where she developed the infrastructure for the newly created (in 1999), full-service editorial department.

Caryl is an active member of the Chicago/Great Lakes Chapter, serving as treasurer and workshop registrar. She has been a member of the Science and Medicine Special Interest Group since its inception and now serves as SIG treasurer. In 2005, Caryl was asked to serve on the Hines Committee, and now in her third year of a three-year commitment, she is chairperson of the committee.

Diana Witt

Diana Witt has been a freelance professional indexer for many years, after beginning her career as an indexer for the New York Times index.  This has provided her with a rich history of indexing triumphs and catastrophes, and she is happy to share these with fellow indexers. She firmly believes that criticism should not be feared, and may be one of the best ways to develop the self-confidence that is absolutely essential to a freelancer's success. Some of the most valuable lessons she has learned have come during the recovery from an index that went bad, and these experiences have always made her a better indexer and a better business manager.

Diana has an MLS in Library Science from Simmons College, but has spent most of her professional life as an indexer and abstractor. She is dedicated to the care and feeding of the indexing profession and is excited and challenged by the changes in information science and architecture that have occurred and will continue to happen. She looks forward to continued association with ASI and to working with her indexing colleagues in this new environment.

Jan C. Wright

Jan C. Wright is an indexer, taxonomist, and controller of wild vocabularies who has operated her own business, Wright Information Indexing Services, since 1991. She is a member of the Society for Technical Communication, American Society for Indexing, and the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She was the editor of A to Z: The Newsletter of STC's Indexing SIG, until its untimely demise in 2006, and is currently one of the instructors of the University of California Berkeley's Indexing Course.

She has extensive experience in software documentation and online system indexing, and is intrigued with the interfaces for finding information. She's abandoned big city life to live in the mountains of New Mexico with her husband Chris and three silly cats, and loves to watch the ravens gather at sunset. Her Web site is at www.wrightinformation.com.

Pilar Wyman

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 typically include medical and technical subjects. She edited the ASI booklet 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, Maryland.

Enid L. Zafran

Enid L. Zafran has been indexing since 1975 and is president of Indexing Partners LLC located in Rehoboth Beach, DE. Not only does she chair ASI's Publications Committee, but she serves as secretary on the ASI Board.  She has presented at numerous indexer, librarian, and lawyer conferences and holds a Masters in Library Science, J.D., and Masters of Labor Law.

Her business, Indexing Partners, met more than 290 deadlines in 2007, and 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.