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	New England Chapter American Society for Indexing Upcoming Events

NEASI Spring 2012 Meeting

Saturday, May 5, 2012
9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Portsmouth Public Library, Portsmouth, N.H.
Levenson Community Meeting Room 175
Parrott Avenue Portsmouth, NH
(603) 427-1540
www.cityofportsmouth.com/library

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Registration and continental breakfast: 9:30am - 10:00am
Meeting begins at 10:00am

Registration form is available here [PDF].
Full program is available here [PDF]
To register, please email the completed form by Friday, April 28, to:
Ray Davis Murdoch Curry, NEASI Secretary
ray.davis.murdoch.curry@gmail.com

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Program

What is the future of indexing?

by Cheryl Landes

With the rapid growth of e-books, tablets, and mobile devices, the ways we consume content are changing. The methods readers use to find content are also changing overall. Despite that, the need for quality indexes will not fade, but the appearance of indexes will be different. The concepts for indexing content will remain the same, however. What will these future indexes look like? Cheryl Landes, who has indexed technical content for 21 years, will answer that question and provide examples of the new world of indexes. Some of these indexes are here already, and the rest are coming sooner than you might think!

Cheryl will cover these topics during this presentation:

• Changes in how people read documentation, and how this is affecting how we look for information. Mobile devices, e-readers, and tablets will be covered in this segment (and any other new devices that may surface between now and the time of the conference).
• A discussion of current interfaces and their benefits and limitations of finding information.
• How to create indexes from one source that will accommodate multiple outputs (print and online).
• New types of indexes, such as in social media and a growing trend of writing "findable" content. (NOTE: The latter differs from search engine optimization techniques.)

Cheryl Landes, an award-winning technical writer and a fellow through the Society for Technical Communication (STC), is the founder and owner of Tabby Cat Communications in Seattle. She has more than 21 years of experience as a technical writer and indexer in several industries: computer software, energy savings, marine transportation, manufacturing, retail, and the trade press. An active member of the American Society for Indexing (ASI) and STC on the chapter and national levels, Cheryl speaks frequently at STC and ASI meetings throughout the United States and Canada.

Visualizing Back-of-Book Indexes

by Ceilyn Boyd

As the popularity of ebooks has surged, so too has interest in how best to enable readers to browse and search for topics of interest within them. Two obvious strategies are to integrate ebooks with full-text search capabilities or hyperlink-enabled indexes. But by encoding indexes as data structures and using computer graphics techniques to visualize them, we can also identify relationships between topics and their locations within the text that are obscured in the traditional presentation of indexes and that are completely unavailable to the reader via full-text search. In this presentation, Ceilyn will describe the research presented in Visualizing Back-of-Book Indexes (The Indexer, Volume 30, Number 1) and discuss its relevance to publishing and indexing workflows, and describe its potential to increase the value of indexes to both publishers and readers.

Ceilyn Boyd has worked as a research analyst, software engineer, and project manager at among others SRI International, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mitsubishi Electric, and BBN Corporation. A graduate of Stanford and Brandeis universities, she also received an MSLIS from Simmons College in 2008. As a fellow at Harvard University, she collaborated on project for archiving electronic mail and the development of a taxonomy for audiovisual materials; she also built web-based software to conduct a long-term survey of those materials. She is now a freelance information scientist and software engineer, and is developing a collaborative software system to analyze and visualize scientific and abstract data, including back-of-book indexes. Ceilyn is currently the Vice President/President Elect of NEASI.

Report from the ASI Conference in San Diego, 2012

by Steve Ingle

Steve will provide us with a short resume of his two presentations at the ASI Conference.

Trends in Digital Publishing: Steve and Jan Wright reported back from two major conferences in digital publishing: O'Reilly's Tools Of Change and Digital Book World. They will talk about trends in digital books, especially as they are relevant to indexers and indexing.

Don't Just Break the Ice, Melt It!: Working the Client Front: Paul Sweum of Top Hat Word & Index and Steve Ingle of WordCo talked about the importance of going beyond just emails, phone calls, and letters to actually building client relationships. They will share their collective wisdom on working the client front; initiating relationships by "breaking the ice" and engaging potential clients, and developing those relationships into win-win scenarios for you and your customers as you "melt the ice." Through this interactive discussion, learn how your customer relationships can bring your business to the next level!

Steve Ingle is the president and CEO of WordCo Indexing Services, located in Norwich, Connecticut. He created his first index (8 lines) at the age of 10. He went on to study German literature at Yale University, and earn master's degrees in German and Russian Area Studies. He began his indexing business out of his home in 1988. WordCo now employs ten people and completes about 500 projects annually for a diverse group of clients. His interests include indexing as a business and the transition to digital publishing. Steve is currently the President of NEASI and the incoming Secretary of the American Society for Indexing.

There will also be a Business meeting. A light breakfast and afternoon break refreshments will be served. For lunch we will visit a restaurant or two near the library.