On Saturday, August 23, 2008, the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the American Society of Indexers (ASI) had their 2008 Fall Meeting. Here are some brief notes from the meeting.
Trends in Indexing: the Long Tail or the End of the Tale?
In her presentation, Jan discussed some opportunities available to indexers as a result of changing digital technologies.
Some points to highlight:
- Changing digital technologies provide opportunities for indexers to take advantage of their skills and for specialization.
- The sales of E-books are increasing and require activated indexes.
- Social tagging requires controlled vocabularies for findability.
- “Precision recall doesn’t go away just because you have a search button.”
- Create “intelligent partnerships” for success.
How are Portable Document Files (PDFs) used in Indexing?
The presenters included Ed Rush, Carolyn Weaver, Jan Wright, & Enid Zafran and the discussion was moderated by Cheryl Landes. The indexers discussed how they use PDFs to work productively.
Here are a couple of Acrobat’s lesser known capabilities worth exploring. Of course, the ability to perform some functions is dependent on the software version in use.
- Acrobat has a compare documents feature that allows the comparison of an older document against a newer document.
- Find and search are different.
The Legal Indexing Workshop
Enid Zafran discussed the differences between legal indexes and other indexes and had attendees work through hands on exercises, involving “treatment of cases,” rules for sorting, and cross-references.
It quickly became apparent that legal indexing can be tedious and knowledge of the US legal system is essential.
Enid recommended two reference resources:
- Black’s Law Dictionary, by Bryan A. Garner
- The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, by Harvard Law Review
Enid also recommended online reference resources that can be found as part of a law school site. One resource I’ve found highly educational and useful is the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School.
For an introduction to law, Legal Research in a Nutshell (O’Reilly Media Nutshell series), by Morris L. Cohen and Kent C. Olson was recommended.
I’ve only posted a tiny bit about my take away from the meeting. It would be interesting to hear what others think about these topics. I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
2 responses so far ↓
Maria // August 26, 2008 at 12:26 am |
Hi Veronica,
I like your summary of the meeting. The links to thinks like the Nutshell and the Cornell law school site (which is full of excellent information, and I use it sometimes in my day job as a law librarian) is great. One thing I would love to see is the comment on “search” and “find” being different in PDF. Perhaps you could explain how they are different!
Thanks!
Veronica Hughes // August 26, 2008 at 4:20 pm |
Yes, not having an intensive background in law, I frequently perused the Cornell law school site during my law class in library school. It is a wonderful resource!
Thank you for calling me on the difference between “search” and “find.” I didn’t know there was a difference until our PNW chapter meeting and tagged it as something to research. I haven’t gotten a chance to research and I will report my findings back to you in the next couple of days. Unless, there is someone out there who already knows and wants to explain the difference to us.