ASI News
—Gain edge on AI and technology at Dec. 6 special event
—Help fill seats on ASI board in 2025
—Webmasters seek additional team member
—It was a day to celebrate indexing
Associated Industry News
—Independent publishing groups combine forces
To Your Health
—LIG offers guidance on insurance
Business and Marketing
—Scour these best-of lists
Spotlight on Maria Sullivan
ASI News
Gain edge on AI and technology at Dec. 6 special event
Thad McIlroy will present "Artificial intelligence and the Future of Publishing" at ASI's 2024 winter special event on Friday, December 6. Thad, a contributing editor at Publishers Weekly and the author of The AI Revolution in Book Publishing, is the keynote speaker for the half-day online program. The event starts at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time; noon Eastern time.
Presentations for "All About Indexing: From Thesauri to AI, Tools and Tips for Working Smarter" include:
Peripherals: Indexers Jola Komornicka, Rudy Leon, and Atholl Robertson will share non-traditional tools that can give you an extra edge in productivity.
Cybersecurity for Business: John Iannarelli, a twenty-year FBI special agent, will show ways we are vulnerable to online fraud and steps to prevent such cyberattacks.
UNBIS Thesaurus: Susan Hussein, a metadata librarian at the UN in New York City, will provide an overview of the United Nations Bibliographic Information System (UNBIS Thesaurus), its history and its role within the controlled vocabulary of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the larger UN community. This will include insights on how updates to the vocabulary are managed, and who is involved in the decision-making process.
Back-of-book indexing with TExtract 11: Software developer Harry Bego will demonstrate how to use TExtract's automated and manual features to boost indexing quality and efficiency.
Both ASI and non-ASI members are welcome. Registration information can be found here.
Help fill seats on ASI board in 2025
ASI’s Nominating Committee welcomes input in filling three vacant seats on the 2025–2026 Board of Directors. Candidates are needed for the following positions:
- president-elect
- two directors-at-large
The president-elect attends all board meetings, serves as president the following year (2026–2027), and then as immediate past president, chairing the Nominating Committee—a three-year commitment in all. Directors serve a three-year term.
Responsibilities of all offices include participating in quarterly board meetings, acting as a liaison between the board and their assigned ASI committee(s), and contributing to other organizational goals and projects of interest. Full details on officer qualifications and duties are in the ASI bylaws.
Committee chair Theresa Duran welcomes your suggestions, by January 10, 2025.
Webmasters seek additional team member
ASI is looking for volunteers to join the webmaster team! If you enjoy updating and tinkering with your own website, this could be the perfect job for you. The workload is fairly light and team members help each other out as needed, so the responsibility never feels too onerous. It’s a great way for newer members to get involved behind the scenes.
The committee works as a team, with each member being on-call approximately one week of each month. The webmaster-of-the-week (WoW) responds timely to emails received in the webmaster mailbox, makes requested updates to the website as needed, and refers questions to other responsible parties if required. If you are interested or have questions, please contact the team.
It was a day to celebrate indexing
ASI's inaugural National Indexing Day was held November 18, 2024, to raise awareness about the indexing profession and about the value of indexes.
In addition to ASI posting National Indexing Day as an event on social media, many members made #indexingday posts across multiple social media platforms, featuring informational graphics and text developed by the National Indexing Day team, according to Shelley Quattrocchi, ASI's president. Some members also printed the downloadable poster to place at their local library or independent bookstore.
ASI’s intent is for National Indexing Day to be celebrated annually, Shelley said.
Here are some FAQs for National Indexing Day, which are useful any time of the year.
Associated Industry News
Independent publishing groups combine forces
In November, the Publishers Association of the West (PubWest) and the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) voted to combine the associations, citing overlap in membership and programming.
This consolidation is effective July 1, 2025. With more than 3,500 members, IBPA is the largest association for independent publishers in the United States.
“The combination of IBPA and PubWest will unite our strengths and provide even greater opportunities for independent publishers to thrive, said IBPA Board Chair Tieshena Davis, in a press release. “This allows us to better support our members through expanded resources, stronger advocacy, and a unified voice that champions the vital role of independent publishers.”
For more information, click here.
To Your Health
LIG offers guidance on insurance
Healthcare open enrollment season is underway. LIG Solutions, a benefit of ASI membership, offers help evaluating health insurance options to find the most affordable and best coverage for your needs.
The enrollment periods for insurance are:
- Medicare Annual Enrollment: Now through December 7, 2024.
- Under 65 Open Enrollment: November 1 through December 15, 2024.
- Employer Coverage: Can typically be done at any time of the year.
Reach out to LIG now or at any time your health insurance needs change. Members log in for more information.
Business and Marketing
Scour these best-of lists
With 2024 drawing to a close, are you thinking about change in the form of a new computer or creating or updating your website?
PC Magazine has recently updated a number of its "best-of" lists for 2024.
Known for their authoritative testing and reviews of technology products and services, the online publication's evaluations offer helpful pros and cons, comparisons of computers' specifications, as well as features like "Who's it For" -- making it easier to find what best fits your needs.
Take a look at recommendations on:
Spotlight on Maria Sullivan
This month's Spotlight is on Maria Sullivan, owner of Maria A. Sullivan Indexing.
If you would like to be in the Spotlight, or would like to nominate someone for it, please contact Laurie Hlavaty.
Where do you live now? Where are you originally from? Do you share your home with pets or family?
I am originally from Northern New York—in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, very close to the border with Québec, Canada. I “moved south” and spent most of my adult life in western New York state, around Rochester and in the Finger Lakes. Just before the pandemic, my husband and I moved to northwestern Massachusetts, near the Vermont and New Hampshire borders. Our timing wasn’t the best, but now that we’re settled in, it’s pretty great being much closer to our three adult children (and two grandchildren).
What is your educational background?
I have my BA in American literature and a minor in accounting. Oddly enough, I started with an AAS in hotel and restaurant management. Throughout school, I always worked in libraries. I did start on my MLS through a satellite program. Unfortunately, the program was discontinued before I had time to finish.
Do you have any hobbies, travels, volunteer work, or other interesting things to share?
I love flowers, especially morning glories. Before we moved here, my husband and I raised flowers and sold flower arrangements at farmers' markets and as a subscription service. The soil at our new home is very sandy, so we are still trying to figure out what will grow best here. We hope to have a thriving cutting garden again soon. You can’t ever hand flowers to someone and not have them smile.
I’m fascinated by history on a local level. Our last house was built in 1915 and was in sad shape by the time we bought it. We put a lot into bringing it back closer to its former glory, but there was so much more that we didn’t get finished. Serendipity led me to find two online dealers who had acquired letters from the wife of the couple who had built the house. I was able to piece together biographies for her, her daughter, and her sister who had moved west. It was very intriguing to understand why certain things in our house were built the way they were.
What kind of work did you do before you studied indexing? Are you still doing that or other work in addition to indexing?
After college and a couple of bookkeeping jobs, I worked for about a year as a clerical assistant at a law firm in the Adirondacks. I then went to work in the Educational Resources Center at Clarkson University as the library acquisitions faculty liaison. Each department had an allotted budget for choosing books for the library’s collection, and a large part of my tasks involved researching and procuring the books they would choose.
Clarkson was the first school in the Northeast that required all incoming freshmen to have a personal computer, and one of the first to have a campus-wide fiber optic network. This was pretty advanced at the time, considering that most of the university computing was still being done on huge mainframe computers, and student computers were running Z-DOS.
Working in libraries has given me a lot more experience using computers than most people. Because of those experiences, I was asked to join the campus help desk on triage. I learned so much there. An added bonus was that we were one of the few locations in the country with access to ARPANET, a forerunner to the internet. As a foreshadowing to the social messaging that we now enjoy, I was awestruck at the ability to message with people around the world in real time.
In addition to creating and updating indexes for the last thirty-plus years, I’ve also provided user support and training for Cindex indexing software. I started helping Indexing Research in 1994, and then continued with Scribendi in 2022. Then this year, Cindex (originally CINDEX) was released as open source software, which brought a lot of changes. Much of my focus since then has been on ensuring that the transition for its users would be as smooth as possible.
As a service to other indexers and publishers, I convert existing indexes into formats to be used for updating and reformatting. Usually, I convert over one hundred indexes a year. I’m often asked to help indexers and editors on complicated projects, and I really enjoy the puzzles presented with moving data from one software to another.
What is a favorite strategy to help motivate or inspire when you are feeling stuck during a work project?
Take a break! It’s hard for me to do that, but sometimes it just happens. It makes it so much easier to go back to my indexing projects. I’m fortunate because besides indexing, I rarely go a day without having a chance to stop to help someone with Cindex, an index conversion, or a work-flow question.
When did you start indexing? When did you join ASI?
I moved to Rochester in 1988. An employment agency scheduled me for an interview with Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, a large established publisher of law books (now part of Thomson Reuters). Since the agent didn’t understand what “indexing” meant, she described it as a cataloguing position. It wasn’t until I interviewed that I found out the turn my career would be taking.
The Indexing Department had a staff of over twenty people creating and maintaining very large indexes on mainframe computers and Wang word-processors. Often, a whole team of indexers would be working on one index that would take up several volumes. We did almost all of the indexing on paper, using huge computer printouts. We marked up prints and sent those corrections to be keyed and sorted overnight. The Indexing Department had just purchased their first two personal computers and had trial versions of Cindex and Macrex. Since I had experience with personal computers, they asked me to try out the software and make a recommendation. We eventually expanded to have a PC on every desk and a dedicated network server for our department. The indexes still went to the mainframe for processing on their way to composition. LCP had its own printing plant, so I was fortunate to see and understand the whole process—from editorial to composition to printing to binding and distribution.
Being indexers and both based in the same city, I was acquainted with Frances Lennie of Indexing Research. After becoming an independent contractor, I started helping with Cindex support and training. I already attended ASI conferences and meetings as an LCP employee; and I’ve lost track of how many conferences I’ve attended since then, presenting Cindex training sessions and workshops. One year Indexing Research asked me to represent IR and CINDEX at the Society of Indexers' (UK) conference, held that year in Dublin, Ireland. My sister came with me, and we made a ten-day trip out of it, including a visit to our great-grandmother’s (my namesake) hometown.
For you, what is the best advantage of ASI membership?
Absolutely, hands down, it’s having access to, and talking with, other indexers. I’ve made some lifelong friendships, and the work contacts are invaluable.
Items to be considered for the See Also newsletter should be submitted by the 15th of the month before publication. For January 2025 issue, please email SeeAlsoEditor@asindexing.org by December 15. Thank you.
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