2025 ASI Conference—Spring into Action!
April 25–26, 2025, Online
Registration opens soon!
Pre-conference Workshop
Thursday, April 24—Intermediate/Advanced
WORKSHOP Become a Regular Einstein! Michele Combs.
Add extra spring to your indexing or editing step! Regular expressions are a powerful tool for manipulating text, from changing capitalization to fixing punctuation to flipping the order of words. This hands-on session will introduce you to regular expressions, from the simple to the complex, and provide you with the opportunity to explore and practice. Attendees should bring a laptop with Microsoft Word installed.
Separate registration required. Limited seating
Friday, April 25—Saturday, April 26
Conference Sessions
SESSION Strategies for Booking Projects. Shannon Li.
Are you a new indexer hoping to find your first project, or a seasoned indexer looking to expand your client base? This presentation will offer a variety of strategies to help you spring into action and book your next job. We will discuss conventional marketing strategies, as well as explore alternative approaches to advertise your services and widen your appeal to prospective clients.
SESSION Indexing and Generative AI. Tanya Izzard.
This presentation will include an overview of how generative AI tools work and share some examples of how they perform at indexing and other related tasks. It will discuss some of the problems involved with using generative AI for indexing work, including reliability and legal and contractual issues. Finally, it will suggest resources and activities to help indexers both keep informed of AI developments and make the case for the value of human indexing.
SESSION Scripture and Ancient Sources Indexing: Current Developments. Richard Shrout.
The presentation will include a brief introduction to both the indexing of standard scriptures and the indexing of ancient sources. These introductions will also introduce the current version of Best Practices for Scripture and Ancient Sources indexing. One goal of this presentation will be to capture areas in the Best Practices that need improvement or expansion. The presentation will include examples from current projects. One current project is a very standard scripture index. Another project is a super complex scripture and ancient sources index for a book written by multiple authors. The presentation will also include criteria for preparing rates for scripture and ancient sources indexes. And perhaps, most importantly, you will learn how to overcome the biggest time waster related to ancient sources indexing, determining the category of the work cited.
SESSION Indexing topic TBD. Devon Thomas.
SESSION Keeping the Pulse of Your Freelance Business: Prompts and Templates to Use Annually, Quarterly, and Monthly. Natalie Silver.
It is vital to give yourself time and space to reflect on your freelance business regularly, not only to hold yourself accountable and assess the health of your business but also to allow yourself room to explore what’s possible professionally. I will share more about my introspective process during this presentation as well as useful prompts and templates to help you incorporate this practice into your own routine.
SESSION Cross-references and Double-posting. Pilar Wyman.
SESSION Reinvigorating Local Chapters and SIGS. Lisa Sorenson, Caitlin Morgan, Sam Arnold-Boyd.
Indexing can be lonesome at times. Email and mailing lists help, but there's no substitute for real-time interaction! Local ASI chapters and SIGS can help establish community, share knowledge, and encourage relationships. ASI's Pacific Northwest Chapter has thrived for decades and managed a successful transition to virtual during the pandemic. In this presentation, we'll talk about the benefits of group membership, how we run a chapter, and strategies for encouraging volunteering and participation.
SESSION Harnessing Your Superpowers of Persuasion. Lila Stromer.
Professional freelancers expressly choose not to be employees. We choose to be small business owners. Unfortunately, Congress, unlike with the rest of the workforce, has never defined freelancers legislatively, which has led to bills over the years that could impact our work. This session is an opportunity to hear about new legislation that could finally legally define us and how to be knowledgeable about those bills and reach out to your members of Congress, should you choose to do so. Over the years, at both the federal level (e.g., the PRO Act) and in many states (e.g., AB5 in California), bills/legislation and regulations have been written/passed that make it exceedingly difficult to remain freelancers. This presentation will explain why this keeps happening and how to “spring into action” to advocate (using your superpowers!) for yourself and your business to urge legislation (and regulations) that will keep your freelance business permanently unfettered.
Program is subject to change without notice.