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INDEXING IN THE HEARTLAND The Newsletter of the Heartland Chapter of the American
Society of Indexers
Distributed to Heartland Chapter members, ASI officers, ASI SIG contacts, and ASI chapter contacts. The Heartland newsletter is now being distributed in electronic format. Verbatim printed copies are available for those who do not receive email. AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INDEXERS HEARTLAND CHAPTER WEBSITE ========= IN THIS ISSUE: CALENDAR OF EVENTS
========= CALENDAR OF EVENTS HEARTLAND CHAPTER FALL MEETING November 5, 2005
Great Lakes Chapter
American Society of Indexers (ASI)
========= HEARTLAND CHAPTER NEWS Marilyn Augst Hello, Heartland members! Did you know that the American Society of Indexers (ASI) is the only professional organization in the United States devoted solely to the advancement of indexing, abstracting, and database construction? The national officers, directors, and committee chairs are all volunteers, most (perhaps all?) with their own freelance indexing businesses. One of our Heartland members, Sandy Topping, is committee chair of the Hines Award. We have 38 members in our Heartland Chapter, which covers Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. We also have members in Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Colorado. The other officers and I are looking forward to our Fall Meeting on Saturday, November 5, 2005. You are invited to attend! Once again, we will hold our meeting at the MCL Cafeteria in Richmond, Indiana, centrally located to our members in Indiana, Ohio, and adjacent states. = = = = = FROM THE PRESIDENT... Marilyn Augst I'm looking forward to our fall meeting on Saturday, November 5, in Richmond, Indiana (at the Ohio border). Our VP, Cathy Seckman, has put a great program together for us. The peer review session will be helpful to both beginning and experienced indexers. Our featured speaker is an accountant and financial planner who will give advice for sole proprietors. Then, I'll present some ideas on organizing the overhead in an indexing business. And we'll end the day hearing from John Bealle and Cathy S. about indexes from hell. (I wonder what they'll tell us?) So, put November 5 on your calendar, fill up your tank, and take a day off to enjoy some time with your colleagues! As indexers, we lead a solitary worklife, so it's important to get together with other indexers once in a while, whether we are beginnings or experienced. Our meeting is open to Heartland members and others who are interested in indexing. I hope to see you there! Marilyn Augst Note: The official meeting announcement is included at the end of the newsletter. = = = = = MEET A FELLOW HEARTLANDER: Leah Hotimlanska Leah Hotimlanska of Middlebury, Ind., is new to Heartland Chapter, but not to indexing and ASI. She has been a multilingual indexer for most of her professional life, and served as an indexing instructor at the University of Chicago. When Leah and her husband moved to Middlebury in 2004, she joined Heartland Chapter. She jumped in with both feet at the spring meeting, agreeing to serve as treasurer. Here, in her own words, is the story of her long indexing career. By Leah Hotimlanska I live and work in a small town of Middlebury, Indiana, in the heart of Northeast Indiana Amish Country I was born in Russia, and grew up and received my early education in Latvia. To be accurate, most of my formal education was in Latvia--from elementary school to the completion of a graduate degree in linguistics. I worked as an instructor of English, first in a high school and then at a university, and also as a cataloging librarian in a major public library in Riga, the capital of the republic. I emigrated from Latvia at the time when it was still part of the former Soviet Union. I started indexing there, mostly in library science and education-related subjects. I was then, essentially, a self-taught indexer. My fondness for indexing as an occupation increased with time, and even though I never received any formal training in indexing. Over the years I maintained and developed indexing skills--by reading everything I could find on indexing, attending conferences and meetings where experience was generously shared, analyzing interesting indexes, and doing indexing in Latvian, Russian, and English. And, of course, teaching indexing later was the best school imaginable: I bet I learned from my students as much or even more than they learned from me! My family came to the U.S. and settled in Chicago, where I returned to library work--at first in a paraprofessional position. When advised to earn a graduate library degree from an accredited program, I enrolled in Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois. At the time of my graduation I was already working as a bibliographer in the Editorial Department of Encyclopaedia Britannica. My work prompted me to take numerous editorial and book-publishing-related courses that were offered though the Publishing Program at the University of Chicago. Many of the courses there were taught by senior editors from the University of Chicago Press, and I started writing indexes for them as a freelancer, after having first met them as my instructors. When the Publishing Program administrators realized the need to offer a course on book indexing, on the recommendation of the Press editors they asked me to develop and teach it. The course was first offered in 1986 as a six-week class, but with the increase of interest in indexing it grew to become a full-semester ten-week course. One of the important features of my class, I believe, was that I was an enthusiastic spokesperson for ASI, and I pride myself for the fact that many of the students were becoming ASI members right at the time of taking the course. After ten years with Britannica, I worked for seven years as a database content editor, indexer, and abstractor for the Gas Research Institute in Chicago, continuing part-time teaching and freelancing, or, as purists would insist, 'moon-lighting' in indexing. Most of my book-indexing was done for academic publishers, such as the University of Chicago Press, the University of Toronto Press, etc. I also indexed for some rather ephemeral outfits such as business newsletter publishers, and consulted on special indexing projects in business and legal publishing. My favorite indexes are the ones for Volume 1 of Mircea Eliade's *Journal* and Volume 2 of his *Autobiography*, both from the University of Chicago Press. Working on this material was definitely a highlight of my indexing career. Another highlight was teaching the Publishing Program indexing course. Many of my students got their first introduction to indexing as a discipline in our class. Some later became fully professional independent indexers and influential officers of our professional association--Fred Leise, Martha Malnor, Caryl Wenzel, et al. Some others still work as indexers for Encyclopaedia Britannica, Commerce Clearing House, etc. In 1998 my workload needed significant reduction. Fred Leise, my former student and an excellent indexer in his own right, took over teaching the indexing course, infused it with a new life, and maintained it as one of the attractions of the Publishing Program for several more years. Lately, however, the program's orientation has changed, and they are not currently offering a course on indexing at this venue. After 1999 I held several consecutive full-time positions for various employers in library science and knowledge management areas, where using indexing skills and sharing them with others were integral parts of the job. These positions were numerous because luxury specialties such as knowledge management have not fared too well with the fading of e-commerce and bursting of the dotcom bubble. To my regret, with all the dynamics of changing jobs and working for the consulting industry, I was moving further and further away from book indexing, and missing it more and more. Now, back to Indiana and the Heartland Chapter: When my husband retired we started playing with the idea to leave the hectic metropolis, in spite of the fact that he was born in Chicago, lived in the area all his life, and worked in Chicago's downtown for about 30 years. Or, maybe, just *because* of that.... In the fall of 2004 I had the opportunity to look this idea of escape straight in the face for the first time. By the end of the year we found ourselves in a brand new home in the rural northeast Indiana, in the restful undulating landscape of Amish Country. I have retained my membership in the Chicago/Great Lakes chapter, and joined the Heartland Chapter to ensure that my ties to the indexing community, indexing philosophy, and the indexing process itself remain viable. I hope to make indexing my main occupation, but, while still organizing our new home (we found that even a new house requires an astounding amount of fine-tuning!), I am currently working as a general office assistant for a local manufacturer of specialty building products, in an environment where nobody knows or cares about indexing. I, however, am certain that my "indexing perspective" on life in general is helping me significantly even here; and besides a tiny but regular paycheck, being in the office for a set number of hours allows me to keep up with my e-mails! I have not done any income-generating indexing for a while and am very much open to suggestions and information from colleagues in our chapter and ASI National. My hobbies are listening to classical music, live and otherwise; reading and especially listening to audio books (this lets my eyes rest, and can be conveniently combined with the next item!); walking and exercising as much as I can after having been hurt in a major accident in 2003; planning some writing projects for when I retire fully (???); watching animals (not only the Amish horses whom I learned to pass safely on the road, but also llamas and alpacas which abound here!); keeping in touch with friends who to my regret do not live in Middlebury; and just being alive. = = = = = HEARTLANDERS IN THE NEWS Heartland indexer John Bealle has just had a book published, *Old–Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival*, by Quarry Books, a division of Indiana University Press (http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-34638-X.shtml). The book details the history of the Bloomington Old-Time Music and Dance Group. Congratulations to John for this effort! Marilyn Augst recently attended a "Meet the Press" event at the University of Indianapolis. She has indexed several books for their Press, and was invited to attend as part of their publishing team. She gave a two-minute presentation on indexing. As we announced before, Larry D. Sweazy was the winner of 2005 WWA (Western Writer's of America) Spur Award for Best Short Fiction. Larry now has a website that gives details on his writing career: http://pages.prodigy.net/larrysweazy/index.html. = = = = = NEW CHAPTER BANK ACCOUNT Leah Hotimlanska Our chapter account has been transferred to a new bank. We had not been receiving good customer service at the previous bank, and its location in Illinois was not convenient to us. The new bank is Fifth Third Bank, a regional bank with branches in Indiana, Ohio, and adjacent states, accessible for the majority of chapter members. However, as often happens in life, there is an additional story to go with this business event. When the bank's assistant vice-president invited me into her office, the first thing she said was: "I really have no idea what indexers do..." I took a comfortable chair, and answered in the voice I used to reserve for the introduction to my indexing class at the University of Chicago Publishing Program: "I will gladly tell you everything..." I gave my 5-minute (or longer?) spiel on what an index is and what an indexer does, with great emphasis that it is us, humans and not machines, who write good indexes. At the end of this I looked to the eyes of my listener to make sure they had sufficiently glazed over--and I was most surprised. She actually clapped her hands, exclaiming, "This sounds like a perfect business for my sister!" Now it was my turn to hear about a woman with two masters degrees (one in English) and several children, who would like to be able to do something stimulating and income-generating from home, instead of returning to a full-time out-of-home job and missing her children's formative years. I enthusiastically gave her the information about ASI and our chapter (I had with me printouts from our web-page in lieu of chapter officer's credentials), and my card in case the prospective member wanted to chat with a live indexer. When the business was finished, we parted as friends. Even if the chapter has not got a new member, we have definitely got a convert! = = = = = NEW HEARTLAND WEBSITE The Heartland Chapter has a new website, thanks to John Bealle. The material from the old site was extracted, redesigned, and uploaded to a new host computer. Please visit the new Heartland site at this url: http://web.spsp.net/jbealle/heartland/index.html John Bealle is the current web host. Please report errors or submit material to John at jbealle@spsp.net. Note that the website now features member contact information. Contact listings are available to official ASI Heartland members, and are meant to provide local contacts in various Heartland coverage areas. If you would like to be listed or need to correct your listing, please write John and he will make the change. Thanks to Pam Nohr for many years hosting the previous site. = = = = = MY TRIP TO THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE by Marilyn Augst The American Society of Indexers held its annual meeting this year in Pasadena, California on May 12 to 15. I had not been to a national conference since Boston in 2001, so I was very happy to be able to go this spring. I'm still a fairly new indexer (in business for 6 years), and my indexing income is still in the "part-time" category, so I am very grateful to the Heartland chapter for the $200 grant to help me with the conference fee. (This grant is authorized in our Policies and Procedures Manual. The PPM is on our chapter website.) Approximately 150 attended the conference, and I knew, met, or spoke with almost 50 of them at some point during the conference. National Conference is such a great place to meet other indexers from all over the country and even Canada! At the lunches and dinners, one just picks a table to sit at and introduces oneself. I find it so interesting to hear how other indexers run their businesses. I attended the Chapter Leaders Meeting. Maria Coughlin, who was just beginning her term as our national president, spoke to us on organizational topics in ASI. I see in my notes that she said she wants to visit every chapter. (Perhaps we should invite her for our spring meeting.) Our new vice president, Seth Maislin, took notes on the discussion from all the chapter leaders. Many of us expressed a need for chapters to receive information on new members. I attended all the breakout sessions and workshops that my scheduling allowed. The workshop at which I learned the most seems to be Kate Mertes' "NASCAR Indexing: Creating and Maintaining Speed". I was quite pleased at the end of the workshop to realize that I already do most of the things she talked about, and now I just need practice and experience! A highlight of meeting in Pasadena was the tour to the Getty Museum which was arranged for us for the last day. I am not an art and architecture authority (being a math and science person), but I thoroughly enjoy museums when I have the chance to go. The Getty was outstanding! I was so happy that the conference organizers took the extra effort to arrange the bus for us. This was the third national conference that I have attended. Every conference has educated me about indexing and motivated me to put more effort into my indexing business. If you can possibly manage to go to a national conference, I highly recommend it. Next year's conference will be in Toronto. Perhaps I'll see you there! = = = = = MINUTES OF SPRING MEETING
APRIL 23, 2005, MCL CAFETERIA, RICHMOND, IN Members Present: John Bealle, Marilyn Augst, Wendy Grainger, Margaret Hentz, Dawn Hays, Leah Hotimlanska, Cathy Seckman, and Margie Towery. Guests: Fred Leise (speaker) Morning Program: Fred Leise, of ContextualAnalysis, LLC gave an excellent presentation on information architecture for indexers. He defined information architecture as usable organization of information as part of website/intranet design. He introduced information architecture concepts and vocabulary and explored the relationships between information and indexing. Information architecture is a target market for indexing services and is a possible area of skills expansion. He also touched on the importance for indexers of knowing about information architecture. Chapter Business Meeting: Call to Order: President, John Bealle called the business meeting to order at 12:45 p.m. Secretary's Report: Minutes from the previous meeting held November 6, 2004 in Richmond, IN were approved as written and posted to the website. Treasurer's Report: Cathy Seckman provided the treasurer's report. Starting balance, as of November 30, 2004 was $2,147.91 and the ending balance, as of March 31, 2005 was $2,114.91. A total of $191.00 was income from the 2004 fall and 2005 spring meeting registrations (to be deposited). Expenses were $73.00 for the 2004 fall meeting expenses and monthly bank fees. Report was approved as read. Committee Reports:
Newsletter & Website - John Bealle volunteered to be responsible for producing the newsletter and updating the chapter's website, in addition to maintaining the email listing. New Business: Meetings:
Membership/Program/Publicity Committees:
Summer Picnic:
Communications:
Adjournment:
Afternoon Program:
Respectfully submitted, Margaret Hentz
= = = = = HEARTLAND CHAPTER, AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INDEXERS
November 5, 2005
MCL Cafeteria - Richmond, Indiana
10:00-10:15 Registration and Welcome We have chosen a mid-morning start time, so that regional members can drive to and from the conference in one day, if desired. 10:15-12:00 Peer review session
For this term selection exercise, we will begin with a work session. Each person will index 15-20 pages from "The Purple Guide," a reference book for dental hygienists. The exercise will not involve editing or preparing a final index. Following the work session, we will compare indexes. 12:00- 12:45 Lunch
12:45-1:30 Chapter Business Meeting
1:30-2:30
Mr. Jackson is a director at Brady Ware, a financial services firm in the Richmond area. He will present a talk on tax topics, including opportunities for tax savings for the self-employed, retirement plan types, and recent tax law changes that might be of interest to small business owners. Mr. Jackson, a certified public accountant and a certified financial planner, has been with Brady Ware since 1980. His duties there include developing business transition and estate plans, and structuring and implementing retirement savings plans. 2:30-3:00 "Organizing Your Overhead"
3:00-3:15 dessert 3:15-4:00 "Indexes from Hell"
Registration Form: Heartland Chapter Fall Meeting, Nov. 5, 2005 Registration Fee: $15 ASI members
Hotel Accommodations: Can be found at I-70 exit 156, at the Indiana-Ohio state line. Motel 6 - 765-966-6682
Directions: Richmond, Indiana is at the Ohio border on Interstate 70, exit 156, 1 hour east of Indianapolis, half an hour west of Dayton, and less than two hours west of Columbus. The MCL Cafeteria is at 3801 National Road East, in the Richmond Square Mall, between Earlham College and the Ohio border. Take I-70, exit 156, onto U.S. 40 (this is the first exit west of the state line). Go west on U.S. 40 for 2 miles to the Richmond Square Mall. Name: ___________________________________________
Please enclose check payable to "ASI-Heartland Chapter". Mail by Oct. 31 to:
You may also pay at the door. However, if you can RSVP to us, that will help us in setting up chairs. = = = = = HEARTLAND ASI OFFICERS President:
Vice-President:
Secretary:
Treasurer:
Committee Chairs and other Contacts Newsletter, Email List Moderator, and Website Maintenance:
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