Our Distinguished Speakers for 2018

ASI 2018 Conference—Speaker Biographies

Eileen Allen
Eileen Allen has been indexing on a casual basis since 1990 and is now in her fifth year providing indexing and copyediting services on a regular basis. Originally trained as a musician and educator, Eileen has taught elementary school music and has performed as a soloist, chorister, and member of instrumental ensembles. And now she is indexing books in music as well as other fields. Eileen also holds an MLS, and has worked in higher education for almost twenty years as a researcher and research administrator. But indexing is much more fun!

Tanja Bekhuis
Tanja Bekhuis, PhD, is a quantitative psychologist and information scientist. She is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals. Her company, TCB Research & Indexing LLC, specializes in the information, health, and social sciences. She uses various language technologies, such as natural language processing and text mining, for content analysis. TCB Classics is her publishing imprint.

Michel Biezunski
Michel Biezunski is an internationally recognized expert in the field of information management. He has invented and promoted new ways of finding information, accelerating access to information which is really needed, and helping organize vast corpora of information assets. His working experience covers various domains, including the publishing, finance, healthcare, and media industries, and governmental agencies. Michel's focus is in the area of semantic integration, auditable information systems, XML/SGML Applications, navigation models within complex information sets. He is one of the inventors of the Topic Maps standard. He has written many articles and developed and conducted numerous workshops centered on these technologies. Michel is now working on innovative solutions for auditability, integration and curation of information systems. Michel's consulting work consists of strategic consulting, as well as helping information owners to enhance their information systems by adding semantic navigation for facilitating access to the items of interest. Michel has developed technologies used in several applications.

Connie Binder
Connie Binder has been a freelance indexer since 1999, and started indexing sports and fitness titles shortly after that. The fast pace and uplifting nature of sports books make them her favorites to index. Connie is a member of the American Society for Indexing, and has served on the Board of Directors. She is currently chair for both the Sports-Fitness Indexing Special Interest Group, and the Mid- and South Atlantic Chapter. Certified by the Institute of Certified Indexers, Connie is dedicated to providing quality indexes, and to promoting consistency and quality within the profession.

Maya Bringe
Maya Bringe is a freelance indexer and project manager. She has been indexing since 2009 and added project management to her business offerings in 2013. She has extensive experience working with OUP production through a third-party packager.

Terry Casey
As owner and chief indexer at Casey Indexing and Information Service, Terry Casey has over 25 years of experience creating back-of-the book indexes. She has followed every twist and turn that embedded indexing has taken over the years and is excited for the new energy that seems to be building for indexing digital publications. Terry began her career working in publishing as a production editor at West Publishing and managing editor of a literary magazine. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing and literary editing and design.

Anne Fifer
Anne Fifer has been a SKY Index Pro user for many years, and has presented an ASI webinar on editing with SKY index. Currently she serves on the ASI Board of Directors as Treasurer.

Heather Hedden
Heather Hedden is a senior vocabulary editor at Cengage Learning, where she has been editing its thesaurus and taxonomies from 1996 to 2004 and resuming again in 2014. In the intervening 10 years she worked as a taxonomist in various employed and consulting positions and also did freelance back-of-the-book indexing. Heather teaches an online continuing education workshop on “Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies” and an ASI on-demand short course “Practical Taxonomy Creation.” Heather is also author of The Accidental Taxonomist, Indexing Specialties: Web Sites, and chapters in Indexing Names and Index It Right, Volume 2. She recently served on a NISO technical report working group. Heather is a past president of the ASI New England Chapter, a past manager of the ASI Digital Publications Indexing SIG and Taxonomies & Controlled Vocabularies SIG, and currently a member of the board of ASI.

Marti Heyman
Marti Heyman has extensive and diverse experience utilizing information science techniques and methodologies to develop effective, sustainable solutions to meet information, content, and knowledge management needs of a broad range of organizations, including manufacturing, e-business, professional services, enterprise software, publishing, and library data & services. She earned her MLIS and MBA degrees from Drexel University in Philadelphia, where she has been an adjunct professor teaching courses on content representation and management of information organizations. She is currently Executive Director Metadata Strategy & Operations at OCLC in Dublin Ohio. Marti has been actively involved with NISO for ten years. Her contributions have included acting as the voting member for three different companies (Dow Jones, Gale/Cengage Learning, OCLC) as well as member and co-chair of the Content and Collection Management Topic Committee (now called the Information Creation and Curation Topic Committee).

Chuck Knapp
Chuck Knapp is the Director of Taxonomy & Indexing at Bloomberg BNA, a leading source of legal and regulatory information for attorneys and other professionals. He has been with Bloomberg BNA’s Taxonomy & Indexing department, in metropolitan Washington, DC, for twenty-five years. His group produces indexes and applies taxonomy tagging to legal news and reference content across a broad range of legal specialties. 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 led the BNA usability study of Online Indexes versus text-only searching in 2005. He authored “I Was A Teenage Indexer Taxonomist” about his transformation from indexer to taxonomist, Chapter 3 of Index It Right, Volume 3. He also wrote the chapter on indexing court cases for the book Indexing Specialties: Law.

Anna-Marie Larsen
Yoga teacher (and indexer) Anna-Marie Larsen has taught yoga to soccer players in West Africa, to medical doctors in Cuba, and to victims of acid attacks in Cambodia. At home in Canada, Anna-Marie teaches mindfulness and yoga to urban-dwellers.

Fred Leise
After a twenty-five year career in arts management, Fred Leise started his indexing career with the University of Chicago Publishing Program introduction to indexing course in 1993. Since 1995, he has been indexing nearly continuously (with time out for taxonomy consulting), specializing in scholarly works in international relations, cultural and political history, and landscape studies. He is a founding member of the Institute of Certified Indexers, an instructor for the University of California, Berkeley Extension Division online indexing course, and has served several terms on ASI’s board of directors, including two terms as president. He regularly presents at both national and chapter events and has written a number of articles on various aspects of indexing for both Key Words and The Indexer. His article on Sherlock Holmes as indexer appeared in the fall 2013 issue of the Baker Street Journal.

Frances Lennie
Frances S. Lennie is the owner of Indexing Research which develops and supports CINDEX™ indexing software for both Windows and Mac. She originally began her indexing career in 1977 while still in the UK, but it was not until 1982—after she had moved to the United States that she began to explore less manual methods of index compilation. In September 1986 Cindex for DOS was released, followed by Cindex for Mac (in 1996) and finally Cindex for Windows in 1997. All the while Frances was indexing in a variety of subject areas and publications (books, journals, newsletter etc) to better understand the needs of indexers working in these areas. Her own subject specialties are medicine and education, but she has a fondness for college-level textbooks. Frances has been active in ASI, holding office at both national and local chapter levels, and attends most of the overseas indexing conferences. This year she is pleased to be attending ASI's national conference n Cleveland, the beloved home town of David K. Ream. His company, Leverage Technologies, Inc., had been the valued partner company of Indexing Research since 1991.

Daniel Lovins
Daniel Lovins has been Head of Knowledge Access Design & Development at New York University (NYU) Division of Libraries since October 2011. His research interests include resource discovery systems, multilingual indexing, open-source software development, agile project management, and linked library data.

John Magee
John Magee is the Director of Indexing and Controlled Vocabulary Services for Cengage Learning. His wide-ranging experience there over the past 20 years covers database indexing, book indexing, vocabulary management, and online product development. He lives with his wife in Wolverine Lake, Michigan, where he has served as Village President since 2006. In his off time he can generally be found on his elderly pontoon boat, pretending to try to catch fish.

Kate Mertes
Kate Mertes is sole proprietor of Mertes Editorial Services, providing indexing, information retrieval, and editorial expertise for complex, challenging projects in law and the humanities. Kate took her B.A. in medieval studies, a Ph.D. in medieval history, and a post-doctoral degree in theology, and after teaching at university level for several years moved into publishing with a stint at Oxford English Dictionaries. After nine years as a managing editor of indexing with Research Institute of America, a legal publishing company, Kate started her own business in 1998. She has lived in Alexandria, VA, since 1992. Kate served on the Board of the American Society for Indexing (ASI) from 1998 to 2004, and has been president of ASI twice, in 2002-2003 and 2009-2010. Kate is a founding member of the Institute of Certified Indexers. Kate is also the author of Good Governance and Politic Rule: The English Noble Household, 1250-1550, and chapters in many of ASI’s publications on the indexing of legal, historical, and theological materials. She is a co-author, with Fred Leise and Nan Badgett, of Indexing for Editors and Authors. In 2013 Kate was the recipient of the ASI/EIS Award for Liberty Fund’s edition of Montesquieu’s Mes Pensées, and was given the Theodore C. Hines Award for services to indexing in 2014. In 2015 she received the ASI/EIS Award for The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents: Volume 3, February 1833 to March 1834, published by the Church Historian’s Press.

Maureen Mullin
Maureen Mullin spent most of her career at the Cleveland Public Library, one of the country's great public research libraries. She was the head of the Photograph Collection, the Business Economics & Labor Department, the Science & Technology Department, and served as acting Head of the Main Library. She received a B.A from Oberlin College and a M.L.S. from Kent State.

Dr. Katharina Munk
Dr. Katharina Munk, a trained biologist, has worked since 1992 as a lecturer, author, editor, and indexer on large projects in biology and medicine. She initiated and has been closely involved in the development of Index Manager since its inception.

Alexandra Provo
Alexandra Provo is Project Manager & Digital Production Editor for the Enhanced Networked Monographs project at NYU. She was the 2015-2016 Kress Fellow in Art Librarianship at Yale University and has been the project manager for two linked open data projects: The Drawings of the Florentine Painters and the Linked Jazz Project. From 2012-2013, she was a photograph cataloger on the “Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance” project at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti. She has an MSLIS from Pratt Institute and a BA in art history from Wesleyan University.

Gale 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 northern California area in which she lives. Indexers, and especially Macrex users and indexing students, 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.

Kamm Schreiner
Kamm Schreiner is the owner of SKY Software and a graduate of Virginia Tech with a BS in electrical engineering. He has been programming since high school and is the programmer of SKY Index Professional. In his spare time he is an amateur musician and songwriter.

Richard Shrout
Richard Shrout, MLS, past-president of the American Society for Indexing (ASI), focuses on domestic and international indexing issues, including the changing digital publishing environment. Richard has a passion for collaboration and service with 20+ years directing technical services in the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Federal Trade Commission library systems. Richard has traveled throughout the world meeting with indexers and associated vendors in places as diverse as China, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Russia. Richard lives and works in Kansas.

Elizabeth Walker
Elizabeth (Liz) Walker has been a freelance indexer since 2002. Liz is a generalist indexing in a wide range of subjects including trade books and textbooks, currently focusing on biography, history, and religion. She is a past chair of the Rocky Mountain chapter and a past ASI Board member.

Jan Wright
Jan Wright specializes in embedding indexing, single-sourcing, and repurposing indexes for multiple formats. She is an active user of InDesign for indexing and book production. Her background includes print production, and development of interactive and ebook indexes. She was co-chair of the American Society for Indexing’s Digital Trends Task Force, focusing on InDesign’s eBook indexing capabilities. In 2009, she won the ASI/H.W. Wilson Award for Excellence in Indexing for Real World InDesign CS3, and in 2013 was awarded ASI’s Hines Award for her service to the Society. She is currently working on indexing the video histories of the Zoo and Aquarium Archives Project, and the Golden Road project for the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus.

Pilar Wyman
Pilar Wyman, Chief Indexer, Wyman Indexing, has been writing indexes as a successful freelancer and consultant since 1990. She works in English, Spanish, and French in health, medicine, technology, and other areas of personal interest. She gives presentations and workshops as her time allows.

Enid Zafran
Enid L. Zafran, an indexer since 1975, has trained numerous indexers, served on the ASI Board, and written and given many talks in the field of indexing. Her business, Indexing Partners, is located in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She is also an ICI-certified indexer from the Institute of Certified Indexers.