2009 Annual Conference

Scaling the Heights
April 23–25, 2009
DoubleTree - Lloyd Center Hotel
Portland, Oregon

Portland News and Notes
November 2008

An occasional report on ASI conference planning
for our Portland meeting, April 23–25, 2009

The frost is on the pumpkin, and the ASI 2009 conference program has been stuffed, dressed, and put into the oven, to be pulled out as a feast for your eyes and mind in early December. I am really excited about all the good ingredients we’ve put in for you! We’ll start off with a day of pre-conference workshops on Thursday, April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday/deathday, hmm—we’ll have to do something about that!). Besides the all-day session for beginners in indexing, this year to be taught by Seth Maislin, we’ll also have three tracks of programs for intermediate and experienced indexers, including a workshop on cookbook indexing (and we’ll also have a new ASI publication on indexing cookbooks available for sale in Portland). Suzanne Fass, an experienced indexer and a cook with professional experience, will lead this seminar. Our welcome reception Thursday evening will be at Powell’s Bookstore, the largest independent bookstore in North America and an indexer’s Disneyland; it’s a short, free public transit ride from the conference hotel.

Rating sessions by experience level. As we have in the past, we’ll be rating each session for beginner, intermediate, and advanced indexers. But people always have questions about what those ratings mean—if I’m a beginner can I go to an advanced-level course anyway? I’ve been indexing for three years, am I intermediate or still a beginner? The truth is, many of the presentations can be enjoyed by people of all experience levels, and much depends on your particular interests and tolerances. For instance, Alice Redmond-Neal, of Access Innovations, will do an all-day session on creating taxonomies. It’s for beginners at taxonomies, rather than beginning indexers. And intermediate and advanced indexers at Margie Towery and Vicki Agee’s program on Creating Elegant Subheadings will come away with different lessons.

So, in keeping with our mountaineering theme of Scaling the Heights, we’ll be using different terminologies for experience levels this time around. Courses suitable for beginners will be labeled with the name and/or photo of Ben Nevis. Ben Nevis, a mountain in the Scottish Highlands and the highest point in the British Isles, was the first mountain I ever climbed. It’s a perfect peak for first-timers—there’s even a pony track that goes almost to the top—but it offers many pleasures to the experienced climber as well, including wonderful views and a few fairly challenging faces.


Ben Nevis

Intermediate level presentations will be labeled as Aconcagua. Cerro Aconcagua, in the Argentinian Andes, is the highest mountain in the Americas and the highest peak outside Asia. Also known as “The Stone Sentinel,” despite its height and its rank as one of the seven summits (the highest peaks on all seven continents), the normal route and Polish Glacier Traverse routes up Aconcagua are not technically difficult, although either would be a tough first ascent. The south-west ridge and south face, however, are real monsters and experienced climbers doing the seven summits often pick these routes.


Aconcagua

Everyone’s heard of Everest, but apart from the altitude, the Hilary Step, and the Third Step on the North Face, Everest isn’t really a difficult climb. Premier athletes who want to challenge themselves attempt K2, and the key word here is attempt. On the border of Pakistan and China, this second-highest mountain in the world has no easy routes, horrendous weather, and extreme altitude, and requires climbers to navigate alternating fields of snow, ice, and bare rock. In other words, climbing heaven, if you know what you’re doing. Nevertheless, some less experienced Himalayan climbers may profitably scale its lower slopes and ridges.


K2

We‘ve carefully planned the Friday and Saturday portions of the program to cater to Ben Nevis, Aconcagua, and K2 indexers. First, on Friday, April 24th, we’ll enjoy a full breakfast and our keynote speaker. Carol Fisher Saller, a long-time copyeditor at Chicago University Press, will talk about her experiences running the Q&A feature of Chicago Manual of Style’s Website. (Carol has a new book out in 2009 on copyediting—it’ll be a must-have for indexers—and will sign books and also give a presentation on A Copyeditor’s Worst Nightmare on Friday afternoon.) Then it’s time for “knotty bits!” Friday morning will be devoted to 12 short sessions, in three tracks, on small but knotty little conundrums that indexers face on a daily basis: Indexing Notes; How to Handle Illustrative Material; Metatopic Menace, etc. Suitable for all levels of indexer, and run informally with lots of time for discussion, these sessions promise to be lively, controversial, stimulating—Indexers Gone Wild! Friday afternoon will devoted to half-day and 1.5 hour sessions, including a workshop from Thérèse Shere on Bushwacking: Indexing Environmental History Texts, and Nancy Humphreys will ask you, How Much Are You Really Worth? We’ll end Friday with an hors d’oeuvres reception, at which we will also have Fun and Games (Intrigued? I’ll tell you more about what we’ve got planned in December!)

Saturday, April 25th, we have about ¾ of the day filled with exciting programs, from Sherry Smith, Scott Smiley, and other members of the Pacific Northwest Chapter on Peer Review, through June Sawyer talking about a writer’s perspective on indexing in Between Two Worlds, to Dave Ream on Using PDF Files to Jump Start an Indexing Project. And then if you’ve got any strength left, we’ll have two, count ‘em, two, indexer field trips: to Portland’s Chinese Gardens, and a tour of Underground Portland.

Posters! Posters! Posters! While we’ve got the workshop portions of the program in place, and plan to have a program online by early December, I’m still happy to consider proposals for Poster Sessions. If you have a small but interesting indexing problem, project, or approach that lends itself to visual representation, make it into a poster and display it in ASI’s exhibit hall. We’ll accept poster session proposals through March 2009. Please fill out a call for proposals (CFP) form right here at the ASI website.

Pricing the experience. Several people have contacted me about a dollar amount for the conference. I’m still working that out, and the ASI board will finalize the budget at the upcoming board meeting, but right now I’m expecting that the costs should be comparable to the Denver conference in 2008 (have a look at the Denver registration forms on the ASI website—follow the links for previous annual meetings—to get a ballpark figure). When the preliminary program is posted in December we should have the pricing in place—we want you to be able to register early! The conference hotel, the Doubletree at Lloyd Center, will have hotel rooms available at the conference rate of $139 per night.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all there!

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