2013 ANZSI Conference: “Intrepid Indexing: Indexing Without
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Intrepid indexing: indexing without boundaries 13–15 March 2013 Wellington, New Zealand Table of Contents Papers • Keynote: Intrepid indexing: from the sea to the stars, Jan Wright • Publishers, Editors and Indexers: a panel discussion, Fergus Barrowman, Mei Yen Chua and Simon Minto • Māori names and terms in indexes, texts and databases, Robin Briggs, Ross Calman, Carol Dawber • EPUB3 Indexes Charter and the future of indexing, Glenda Browne • People and place : the future of database indexing for Indigenous collections in Australia, Judith Cannon and Jenny Wood • Indexing military history, Peter Cooke • Ethics in Indexing, Heather Ebbs • Running an Indexing Business, Heather Ebbs, Pilar Wyman, Mary Coe and Tordis Flath • Archives and indexing history in the Pacific Islands, Uili Fecteau and Margaret Pointer • Typesetting Dilemmas, Tordis Flath and Mary Russell • Can an index be a work of art? Lynn Jenner and Tordis Flath • Advanced SKY Index, Jon Jermey • East Asian names: understanding and indexing Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) names, Lai Lam and Cornelia (Nelly) Bess • Intermediate CINDEX - Patterns for the Plucky, Frances Lennie • Demystifying indexing: keeping the editor sane! Max McMaster (presented by Mary Russell) • Numbers in Indexing, Max McMaster (presented by Mary Russell) • Japan's indexing practice, Takashi Matsuura • Understanding Asian Names, Fiona Price • Indexing Tips and Traps; Practical approaches to improving indexes and achieving ANZSI Accreditation, Sherrey Quinn o Indexing Tip and Traps — slides o Practical exercise • Converting Legacy Books to eBooks with Linked Indexes, David Ream • The Mysteries of Fiction Indexing, David Ream • Editing the ANZSI/AusSI Newsletter Index, Mary Russell • International Panel Reports from overseas societies on developments in their countries Mary Russell (chair), Heather Ebbs, Pilar Wyman, Takashi Matsuura • Metatopic Menace, Kay Schembach • INNZsight: Index New Zealand in focus, David Small and Nancy Fithian • Future Electronic Indexing, Claire Stent and Trish O'Kane o Future of indexing o XML exposed o Linked data: a new way to navigate o Crowdsourcing o Summary • Indexing techniques and EPUB, Jan Wright and Glenda Browne o The Matrix • ASI Digital Trends Task Force Update, Jan Wright, David Ream and Pilar Wyman • Presenter bios From 2013 ANZSI Conference – Intrepid indexing: indexing without boundaries Intrepid Indexing: From the Sea to the Stars: Jan Wright www.wrightinformation.com * [email protected] * @windexing Keynote, ANZSI Conference, Wellington, New Zealand March 13, 2013 Thank you all and a special thank you to ANZSI’s Conference staff for bringing me down under to be here. I am so happy to be in New Zealand to talk to you today. Welcome to all Intrepid Indexers, and to publishers, editors, and writers who are here to join us in discussing indexing. It is great to see you here, and I hope this conference will be a lively discussion of indexing in all of its facets. Intrepid indexing is such a wonderful theme: the synonyms for Intrepid are “fearless” and “brave.” There’s also a touch of adventure in the word, at least to me. A sense of choosing to go forward bravely and a bit of excitement as well. It sounds like a ship we are all on, making ready for a journey. We are on a voyage in indexing. The past 30 years have changed indexes and indexing radically. Some of us in this room may remember doing an index using 3x5 cards in a shoebox. I entered the field when there was already specialized software, and indeed my work has been very technical in nature. But my indexing instructor, Nancy Mulvany, made me do an index with cards just to get the idea and experience. I love software…. because I have typed many a catalog card for the libraries I worked in long ago, and I can remember when the self-correcting key on a typewriter was the best new thing ever. My voyage has taken me through mainframe programming, library work, the dawn of desktop publishing, the dawn of embedded indexing, the dawn of online-based indexes, and I have been working with the monitor or screen as the main display for my indexes for two decades. What a voyage it has been! Indexing is an ancient art whose time has not yet come: Lise Kreps, 1990 My friend Lise said this to me as I was considering becoming an indexer back in 1990, and it is true still today. I have been amazed at how this comment has continued to be relevant. Indexing has gone through technological changes rapidly, and we have seen genuine challenges to its purpose and meaning in the post-Google world. But indexers have been intrepid and risen to each challenge, and I think the time is coming. 1 Indexes have gone from cards to sophisticated software, from print galleys to PDF files and XML files. Indexes are evolving from a “good thing to have in a print book” to an essential tool for people to use to discover books in a world lacking bookstores and easy browsing. Indexes are a unique thing: they are navigation, they are metadata, and they are a way for people to choose what content to purchase. Indexes are transitioning to a page-free environment, and are now tagging aboutness at the paragraph level and perhaps down to the very word. As indexers, we are merging and mashing up index data across publications, mixing and matching content indexing, and fine-tuning it for search engines wise enough to use it. In some handheld apps, the index is the first thing you see. In all too many ebooks, though, the index is missing or inactive, and that must change. For the last two years, we have been working hard internationally to change that state of affairs, and I feel we have had some amazing successes. At the recent Tools of Change Conference in New York, “index for discovery” was one of the top five buzzwords for the conference. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Tools of Change, it is the conference where the bleeding edge of publishing and the leading influencers of econtent gather each year. For intrepid voyagers like us, Tools of Change has been like receiving a grant from a geographical society, allowing us to take our explorations further and publicizing our successes. They have invited us to give presentations and workshops for two years now. Publishers are now realizing that our metadata is a tool that can help people find and buy content. But we still have a lot of challenges. They could be merely ice bergs or small engine breakdowns along the route, or they could sink us. We have some navigating to do and need all hands on deck. Staying Intrepid In order to survive these changes and keep the work we do and the metadata we provide accessible to publishers, we have to do several things. In essence, we need to: Stay on top of new technologies: keep informed of new software and tools, and explore them. Act as advisers to people implementing technology: often we are seeing new programs for creating ebooks or econtent that confuse indexing with tags, or are not designed to make it easy to read the index or write it. If we can get in at the beginning, we can advise on these issues. Adapt ourselves to new ways of working: how can we make this easier, faster, or less buggy? Provide advice and workflow processes to our clients in more detail than we have been: when we know a tool inside out, its tricks and whimsies, we can advise clients adopting it. We can also guide how indexes should be written for 2 different interfaces and presentation modes. Paper is just another interface, and we need to look at each interface’s limitations and strengths when we write for it. And of course, be fearless and brave on the voyage! Here be dragons, but our ship can get through with a good crew. Intrepidly exploring There have been many ships named Intrepid, and it is a long and honored name on the seas. It says everything you think a ship should be. Fearless! Brave! And again it has a sense of adventure about it. If we think of ships as indexing technologies, we can see we are on a voyage from the sea to the stars. But we don’t want this to happen to us as we go forward. This ship, the HMS Intrepid, was involved in the hopeless search for Lord Franklin in the 1850s. Do you all know about Lord Franklin, who was an Arctic explorer and a former governor of Tasmania? It is an amazing story of exploration, loss, mystery, sacrifice, and a woman’s love. I’m hopelessly addicted to reading about such voyages, and Franklin’s is one of the most dramatic. Lord Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage disappeared in the Arctic after setting sail in 1845. After two years and no word or sign of the ships, Lady Franklin persuaded the British government to send a second expedition to find Franklin, which resulted in its own disasters. The HMS Intrepid was part of this rescue expedition of 1850. The crew actually found some remains of the 3 Franklin expedition, but Intrepid itself was caught in the ice and had to be abandoned, its doom coming when the ice crushed it in the cold. The crew survived. Over the years, the quest for Franklin became an obsession, and Lady Franklin’s Lament became a popular song. Here’s a bit of it for you. (Small snippit of music) Haunting, isn’t it? But we can be sure that our explorations in indexing don’t get trapped in time.