The ALL-SIS Newsletter Committee has been dreaming about having a cumulative index for the ALL-SIS Newsletter for several years. Why index the newsletter? Currently, the ALL-SIS website contains issues of the newsletter dating back to 1998. With four issues a year, that is a lot of information to sort through. An index will help readers find not just articles from years past, but also member information, events and authors. So this year we took action and requested funding from the ALL-SIS Executive Board for the project. The Board approved the project and provided funding in early 2010.
So how is the index being created? The first and most important step was to find an indexer. An indexer is crucial to the process of creating a useful index. The indexer will go through the newsletter issues, create consistent headings and subheadings, specify the locations, create cross-references, and distill concepts into useful index entries. The indexer can then deliver a pdf version of the index for us to place on the website. As an ex-editor for Thomson West, I’ve worked with a number of indexers and was able to find one fairly easily just by making a few calls. For anyone else who would like to hire an indexer, The American Society for Indexing has a “Find an Indexer” tool which allows you to search for an indexer by location, language, sub-specialty, materials indexed, and the type of software the indexer uses.
The second step was to find indexing software. Although an indexer is the creator of the index, software is needed to sort, arrange, and display index entries. Having indexing software will allow us to update and manipulate the index file sent to us by the indexer. There are several indexing programs on the market, including Cindex, Macrex and Sky Index. We chose Cindex because of its ease of use, level of customer service support and because many freelance indexers use Cindex.
The third step was to write instructions for the indexer. The indexer needs to know how detailed our index needs to be, how we would like cross-references represented, how we would like page entries represented, and many other stylistic questions. Now that we have found an indexer, purchased software, and given the indexer instructions, it’s time to wait for our index to be delivered. After that, we may send the index back with any edits we may have and then we can put the final product on the website. We should look forward to seeing an index for the newsletter very soon. The indexing plan includes planning for indexing future issues as well.
For more information in indexing and indexers, see the website of the American Society for Indexing located here: www.asindexing.org.