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	New England Chapter American Society for Indexing Past Events

Fall 2009 Conference Summary

September 19, 2009
Lexington, Massachusetts

The 2009 annual fall conference of the New England Chapter of the American Society for Indexing (NEASI) was held on Saturday, September 19, at Cary Memorial Library in Lexington, Massachusetts. The event was well attended by over 40 people from throughout New England and beyond.

Annual Fall Meeting

Using PDFs in Indexing - Cheryl Landes, Owner of Tabby Cat Communications (Speaker biography)
In this condensed info-packed version of her half-day workshop, and using her book of unusual, true stories about late frontier days in the Pacific Northwest (Those Wild Northwest Days), Cheryl brought workshop participants directly into the 21st century by showing how we can work with PDF documents in Adobe Acrobat Professional 9.0.

Starting with all the different versions of Acrobat listed and described, we learned how much manipulation is actually possible with PDFs. From simple searching, to copying and pasting, comparing different versions of the same document, extracting or adding pages and repagination, making comments on or edits to the text itself, adding additional levels of security to our own PDFs (think invoices!) and more, the workshop showed how surprisingly flexible these otherwise stable PDF documents can be.

The addition of a helpful handout with notes and procedures for all the processes discussed allowed participants to relax and engage in active questions and discussion, and made this a particularly useful presentation for indexers seeing more work arriving in PDF format.  

—    Submitted by Diane Johns

Searching PDFs: One Indexer’s Experience - Steve Csipke (Speaker biography)
While much of the technical information in this session worked to reinforce techniques from Cheryl’s previous PDF workshop, the value of this presentation was its ability to give encouragement and support to indexers needing to transition into learning new tools in their work.

In his recent career evolution to freelancing, Steve found himself faced with PDF documents from publishers, and had to figure out how to use them best given his already-established indexing thought processes and work flow. Steve went on to describe some software features that kept him interested in learning more about PDFs and Adobe Acrobat Reader, one of which was being able to have a searchable file of his past work. He also suggested that it is still possible to work effectively with PDFs without necessarily using all of the features available in the software. He added that most of the effort involves getting over the initial fear and learning curve.

Steve acknowledged that we all tend to plateau, usually only learning the minimum of what our software can do. He encouraged us to make the effort to learn a little more. Most importantly, Steve said that the thought processes are the same whether you are working with paper or with PDFs, and that we can look at our own process and work flow and explore how we might be able to do those tasks electronically.

Steve offered a generous handout, which includes clear background information and context as well as very practical “how-to” instructions for functions of particular interest to indexers. He will post additional information on the NEASI site after the conference. 

—    Submitted by Diane Johns

A is for Arbitrary - Seth Maislin, Managing Partner of Potomac Indexing, LLC (Speaker biography)
Alphabetical order, despite its illusory appearance of being easy to implement, is a terrible way to organize things. We don’t think, talk, or act alphabetically, nor are we limited to the alphabet when we think, talk, and act. Let’s take some time to explore all of the other, better sorting options, learn how to implement them practically, and find lots of good excuses to abandon the boring A to Zzzzz. An expanded summary presents details of Seth's presentation.

 

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