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All About Indexing #7: Starting An Indexing Business, Part 1: Training
Hi, everyone! For my last two columns, I would like to talk about how one goes about starting an indexing business. I believe that the skills needed to become a good indexer are partly innate and partly acquired. My indexing teacher, the great Kari Kells, says in the introduction to her Basic Indexing Tutorial that on her first day of an indexing class she took in library school, she knew she had found the perfect career as her teacher described the way she had always automatically sorted her photos by category, and Kari nodding and smiling as she recalled her own automatic sorting of M&Ms by color, and music by genre, then alphabetical,then chronological, etc. (Anyone out there nodding and smiling at this?)
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All About Indexing #6: Interviews With Indexers
Hi, everyone! Continuing last column’s discussion of the history of indexing, I have found that these days there are almost as many methods of index creation as there are indexers! At this point I felt like my book research could only take me so far, so I decided to interview a few longtime indexers to get some anecdotes on the topic. Mike Bennett, Ellen Chapman, Linda Hallinger, Pam Rider, Barbara Roos and Kamm Schreiner come from a variety of backgrounds and I learned a lot from speaking with them!
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All About Indexing #5: The Process of Index Creation
Hello again, my fellow Elephants! I would like to continue this week on the topic of “how we index”—indexing processes of yesterday and today and the history of indexing technologies. The American Society of Indexers (www.asindexing.org)website gives the following standard process:
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All About Indexing #4: A History of Index Creation
Hi, everyone! For this column I would like to talk a little about the history of the index. I don’t think this is something I learned about in indexing school, so writing this will be a history lesson for all of us!
Even before books were invented,the Greeks and Romans were already hard at work discovering different ways of organizing information. One of the first forms of written material they used was the papyrus scroll, but it was not very efficient when it came to information retrieval.
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All About Indexing #2: The Importance of Indexes
The most frequently-asked question that professional indexers get, it seems, is “can’t a computer do that?” My next column will deal with the differences between an index and a concordance, which is what computers can do, but in the meantime I want to explain what an index is and why indexes are a necessary part of a book. The American Society of Indexers website (www.asindexing.org)gives an excellent overview for anyone wanting to know basic information:
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All About Indexing #1: Indexing in Israel
Hi! My name is Shoshana Hurwitz,and I’ll be doing a column for Elephant about a profession that seems to belittle-known in Israel (though I hope to change that!): indexing. To see an overview of my background and how I ended up becoming a professional indexer, check out my member bio page.
For my first column, I'd like to talk about how indexing is perceived in Israel. I don’t believe it to be any coincidence that the very same month that I found my true calling professionally was the month that my husband, daughters and I started our journey towards aliyah, which will culminate this coming July. But as excited as I was about my new love of indexing, I was dismayed to discover that my new internet friends in Israel were not quite as much. Here in Israel,they told me, indexing is not really thought of as a profession in itself. Itis something that librarians do, something that tech writers do, but not something that just is.
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Upcoming Events
- 4th Annual Tech Writers Family Picnic (marcom and copy editors are welcome)
Aug 15 2008 (10:00 - 17:00) - Submission Deadline for Papers on "Challenges to the Jewish people"
Oct 31 2008
Upcoming Courses
- Fundraising Course
Jul 27 2008 - Aug 17 2008 (16:30 - 19:30) - Grantwriting Course in Jerusalem
Aug 05 2008 - Aug 26 2008 (18:00 - 21:00) - Using Captivate to Create Video Demos (enhancing software documentation)
Sep 03 2008 - FrameMaker 8 + RoboHelp 7 Integration (hands-on)
Sep 04 2008 - Using FrameMaker (hands-on)
Sep 08 2008 - Sep 10 2008 - Single Sourcing with FrameMaker
Sep 11 2008
Summaries