The CAPITAL INDEXER

Newsletter of the Washington, DC, Chapter of the American Society of Indexers

Volume 13, Number 2 www.indexing.com/dcasi August 2006

The Capital Indexer is published for and about the Washington, DC, Chapter of the American Society of Indexers.

2006–2007 Chair

Deborah Patton

8416 Elko Drive
Ellicott City, MD 21043

410 480-0997

dp@pattonindexing.com

Immediate Past Chair

Kate Mertes

118 North West Street
Alexandria VA 22314-2710

(703) 549-4574

kmertes@hotmail.com

Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect

Peggy Ruppel

17226 King James Way

Gaithersburg, MD 20877

Secretary

Jean Bray

540 South Church St. Unit 1

Shepardstown, WV 25443

304 876-0554

brayjwv@juno.com

Treasurer

Mauro Pittaro

6300 Bayberry Court, Apt 1103

Elkridge, MD 21075

917 882-3967

agma345@comcast.net

Newsletter

Jean Skipp

420 Spruce Drive

Exton, PA 19341

484-875-0603

includesindex@aol.com

Webmaster

Matthew White

Coughlin Indexing

121 Cathedral St

Annapolis, MD 21401

410 269 0978

matt@indexing.com

Perspectives on Getting Started in Indexing

WHEN: September 9 (Saturday), 10am to 1:30 or so pm

WHERE: EEI, 66 Canal Center Plaza, Suite 500, Alexandria, VA 22314-55007. The people at EEI are allowing us to use their conference room once again.

WHAT: A panel of experienced indexers will talk about how each got started in indexing. It’s different for all of us. Pilar Wyman has been writing indexes since 1990 and has volunteered for various positions for this chapter and our national organization. She is one of the teachers for the USDA course and the upcoming ASI Training in Indexing course. Many of you may recognize her as the editor of KeyWords. She lives in Annapolis, MD. Sue Nedrow has worked in the publishing field for over 20 years. She did editing, proofreading, research, and word processing work before she found indexing (or it found her) in 1991. Sue began indexing as a subcontractor, then transitioned to her current independent status. She is a generalist and has indexed books, catalogs, manuals, periodicals, and other materials. Sue lives in Springfield, VA. Dave Luljak has been indexing for a few years and named his business Third Floor Research & Reference, Inc. I’m looking forward to getting to know Dave and how he got started in indexing. Dave lives in Baltimore.

RSVP: Please let us know if you are planning to attend by September 7: mail@pattonindexing.com or call Deborah Patton at 410-480-0997.

REFRESHMENTS: Please bring a bag lunch. There are sandwich shops in the vicinity. We’ll provide dessert and drinks. We hope you can stay for lunch and informal chatting. We’ll also provide juice, coffee, and tea to get us started.

DIRECTIONS: are on the Internet at http://www.eeicommunications.com/home/directions_alex.html

Take Route 1 or the George Washington Parkway into Old Town Alexandria. If you are coming from the north, turn left onto Montgomery Street: from the South turn right onto Montgomery Street. Take it all the way to the river, crossing the train tracks. The entrance to EEI is on your left.

PARKING: There is lots of street parking around EEI on a Saturday. There are also several parking garages in the immediate area.

METRO: The closest metro stop is Braddock Road which is about a ¾ mile walk on any street heading west to EEI.

Notes from the Chair

Future meeting plans: These are still in the planning stages, so some of it isn’t set in stone. One that is coming together is the follow-up to the USABILITY STUDY on October 27. Kate Mertes has a report for us elsewhere in this newsletter. The other two meetings will be in 2007 on February 24th and April 14^th. While I’m not sure which piece will happen which time, here is a preview of some of them and why we are presenting them.

The February Meeting: The February meeting will be a one-day or one morning affair at a location to be determined and will be devoted to office and indexing technology. We rely on computers to produce our products for our customers. But many of us find what works and don’t have a chance to find out about tricks that would make us efficient. Lisa Costello, an indexer living in Baltimore, has a day job as a network systems administrator. As part of her job she regularly teaches people how to be efficient using basic Windows-based software. It’s amazing how some of those tricks can be applied to our indexing software. Some of them are basic to Macintosh environments too.

Some of us have websites to advertise our business. Others don’t, in part because we’re so busy with everything else and that’s a technological hurdle we just don’t need to jump. Or do we? I’m going to find people to talk about our business websites – what the benefits are for having one, what needs to be included, how much you have to learn about HTML, and how to maintain them.

Software demos. We haven’t had our indexing software vendors provide workshops on the east coast except at national conferences in some years. It’s time. These workshops are wonderful to learn either basic things we’ve overlooked or more complex searching with patterns.

In addition to looking at our Big Three indexing software packages (Cindex, Macrex, and SKY Indexing Pro), I’m going to find people to demonstrate embedded indexing using FrameMaker and DEXter which is a tool for embedding in Word.

The April Meeting: This fall Pilar Wyman will doing a workshop at the meeting of the BioCommunications Association (BCA) and the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) in Frederick, MD that will help them think about selecting keywords and tags for images so audiences will know what they’re looking at and be able to search for those keywords and tags. She’ll adapt that workshop for us in April. As we face the reality that we have indexers spread up and down the Atlantic coast, my plan for the April meeting is a bit more involved. While the meeting most likely will be in the Baltimore–Washington area, I invite all of you consider coming on Friday night and staying through Sunday morning. How can we do that? Here in Ellicott City (sort of between Baltimore and Columbia, MD) we have a guest room, a couple of sofas and probably enough bathrooms to handle a two or three people. Who else in the Baltimore–Washington area can open a similar “Indexer Hotel??” Please let me know. We also need information on hotels or motels that are priced reasonably. I’ll be looking for them, but we can sure use other people’s ideas.

My plan for Friday is to gather for a Peer Review of lots of indexes in the late afternoon – say 3 or 3:30. Dinner that night will be wherever there are indexers gathering for the Saturday sessions. We’ll find a location in northern Virginia, probably one in the Annapolis area or southern Maryland, and another in the Baltimore area. Saturday we’ll do sessions twice, so you won’t miss anything and so there won’t be such a crowd at them that you can’t hear or see. We’ll provide lunch on Saturday. Saturday night my plan is we all go out to dinner then go home on Sunday.

Yup, this is ambitious, but it could be a lot of fun too. Indexers from farther away are going to have to spend some time and money to get here. This will be professional development and is a tax-deductible expense. Chapters in other parts of the country serve more than indexers local to a particular city or state – we can too. Talking with other indexers is tremendously affirming. And I always learn something. So put February 24^th and April 14^th on your calendar and begin thinking about gathering in the Baltimore–Washington area this year. .

Deborah Patton

2006-2007 Chair

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In Passing

Cecily Orr Nuckols

There was a notice in the Washington Post on July 25, that Cecily died of cancer on July 22. While she had not been an ASI member in recent years, Cecily had been an active member of this chapter in years past. She worked at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University from 1979 to 2002. The obituary in the Post said she was a bibliographer there, but she also was part of a team that managed a thesaurus on bioethical research. At a chapter program in the early 1990s, I remember her talking about how they chose terms to include in the

thesaurus. It was fascinating and she was one of those people who talked with her hand so it was fun too. Cecily served as chapter treasurer for three terms from 1985 to 1989, then as chapter secretary for two terms from 1989 to 1991.

From the Post article:

“Mrs. Nuckols was born in Newport, Vt., and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont. She received a master’s degree in library science form Indiana University in 1973 and a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Oregon in 1978. That year she moved to Arlington. She was active in the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Georgetown University and volunteered at the Smithsonian Institution. An opera enthusiast, she was a regular season subscriber to the Washington Opera. Mrs. Nuckols was active the St. Charles Catholic Church in Arlington County, where she served as a Eucharistic minister. Survivors include her husband of seven years, C.G. Nuckols of Arlington; two step-sons, a sister, and a brother. She was 54. Contributions can be made in Cecily’s name to Heifer International at www.heifer.org/myregistry/cecily or to the Arlington Community Foundation, Cecily Orr Nuckols Memorial Fund, 2525 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22201.

ASI National Conference 2007

Plan now to join your colleagues in Philadelphia, May 23-27, 2007, for the
2007 ASI Annual Conference, where we will celebrate ASI's 40th anniversary
and explore the issues and technological advances that shape our profession.

The theme for the 2007 conference, taking place in one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution, is "Liberating the Index" -- recognizing the reality that our profession now expands far beyond back-of-the-book indexing and embraces formats and technologies that were unimaginable when the Society was founded in New York City in 1968. Conference programming will
address that reality, with sessions that honor our history as a Society and explore the tools and issues that 'liberate' both the index and our professional lives.

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New Bumper Sticker

We printed a new bumper sticker this summer and put one in each packet of those attending the ASI conference in Toronto. We’ll have them at each meeting this year. This one says: The Truth Is Out There, It’s Just Not Indexed Very Well. Vice Chair Peg Ruppel found the slogan on a homemade button. We’ll sell them for $4 a piece with most of the proceeds (except sales tax) going into the chapter treasury.

Usability Study Update
by Kate Mertes
Last April we met with Dick Evans and learned about the steps involved in designing and implementing a usability study. Dick advised us that our first step would need to be the discovery and/or creation of a "golden index," which we'll need as the main platform for investigating issues of usability. The "golden index" is not necessarily a perfect index - in fact, for testing purposes, we might intentionally introduce flaws - but it does have to be an index without faults that can get in the way of testing, such as wrong or incomplete page number references. It also must be flexible in size and scope, and its text must be generally accessible and interesting to the readers we wish to test. We also need to have the index in an electronic format that we can manipulate, so we can test different styles and methods.

I believe I've found a book and index that fits the bill, a natural history text with an excellent index. Our next step will be to evaluate and vet the index so we are sure it meets our requirements and doesn't have any hidden problems. (In Dick's talk, for instance, he pointed out that the three-column presentation used in a test index created readability issues that complicated the usability questions his team was trying to ask.) We'll be meeting on Saturday October 21st to go over our "golden index." It should be a useful exercise in evaluating and reviewing an index, as well as another step towards creating a usability platform.

__________________________________________________________________

ASI/Washington Chapter Name Change and Membership Ballot

When the Washington, DC, Chapter was founded in March 1978, it was in response to a preponderance of indexers living in proximity to the DC metro area and serving the publishing industry connected with the national government. Some members were in

house indexers, some freelance -- but location was the key factor.

It is time for the Washington, DC, Chapter to catch up with the times. Technology has freed many of us to live wherever we want and submit our indexes by email. We have members spread from Pennsylvania to Florida, from the east coast to Ohio. Other ASI chapters cover regional areas -- the New England Chapter and Pacific Northwest Chapter are two examples. People who live south of about the middle of Virginia or west of the appalachian Mountains likely do not think our programs are meant for them. Changing our chapter name is one way to begin that attitude adjustment and broaden our collegial relationships. To that end, we propose changing our chapter name from Washington, DC, Chapter to the Mid- and South-Atlantic Chapter (MSA).

Our current Chapter Bylaws on the name of the chapter reads:
ARTICLE 1 -- NAME
The name of this Chapter shall be the Washington, DC, Chapter
We propose amending the Chapter Bylaws to read:
ARTICLE 1 -- NAME
The name of the Chapter shall be the Mid- and South-Atlantic Chapter (MSA).

In addition, we must change the bylaw on Membership. These Bylaws were written in

1995 before we had a professional management office. Now that we do, they do not follow our bylaw about membership, but instead allow members to choose one chapter to affiliate with at no extra charge to the member and to choose additional chapter affiliations for a small fee.

Our current Chapter Bylaws on membership in the chapter reads:
ARTICLE V: MEMBERSHIP
Membership in the Chapter shall be held automatically by those members of ASI who reside within the geographic area covered by the local Chapter, as determined by the Board of Directors of ASI and defined by zip code of home addresses.
We propose amending the Chapter Bylaws to read: ARTICLE V: MEMBERSHIP
Membership in the Mid- and South-Atlantic Chapter shall include all those members of ASI who choose to affiliate with this chapter.

Cast your vote online (through the email sent by ASI on August 11) by September 1.

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Upcoming Events

September 27 to Oct. 5, 2006

Fall for the Book

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA

www.fallforthebook.org

September 29-October 1, 2006

Baltimore Book Festival

Baltimore, MD 21201
www.baltimorebookfestival.com

September 30, 2006

National Book Festival,

National Mall

Washington, DC

www.loc.gov/bookfest

October 21& 22, 2006

West Virginia Book Festival

Charleston, WV

www.wvhumanities.org/bookfest/bookfest2.htm

November 3-9, 2006

American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)

Hilton Austin, Austin, Texas

http://www.asist.org