Resources: Events - ASI/IASC Conference
Panel Presentation: Case Studies in HTML Indexing
Friday, June 16, 2006
Breakout Session 8: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
1. IASC/SCAD: A Web Site Index in Two Official Languages
This case study examines the creation of an alphabetical index for the
IASC/SCAD Web site, which is presented in both English and French –
the two official languages of Canada.
Presenter Cheryl Lemmens began indexing books
and Web sites in 2001 after some 20 years as an editor. She has worked
in a wide range of milieus, from newspaper and magazine writing to editing
at the Hansard office of the Ontario Legislature, at a major legal publishing
company, and at a Toronto Internet development and consulting firm. Cheryl
currently serves on the IASC/SCAD executive as Webmaster, and is a member
of the ASI’s Web Indexing SIG. Her post-secondary education includes
a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Applied
Arts in journalism from Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.
2. Increasing 'Findability': An A-Z Site Index for a Call Centre
Intranet
At American Express Canada, call centre agents respond to over 100 inquiries
in a day. They need quick and easy access to relevant information on their
reference intranet. Ian Cooper describes how he compiled an A-Z site index
for the intranet to make product, policy, and procedure information easier
to find.
Presenter Ian Cooper
is a Senior Technical Writer at American Express Canada, where he has
managed content on the call centre reference intranet for the past five
years. He is passionate about plain language and other strategies for
making information more accessible to users. Ian holds a Certificate in
Information Design from the University of Toronto and a Certificate in
Technical and Professional Writing from York University.
3. Conversion Projects
More and more book and paper resources are being published on the web,
as well as in print. Pilar Wyman will present a case study of one of these
projects, and will describe how the web version of a book index is prepared
and published online. Pilar will show us the book ('before') and web ('after')
versions of the same index (with shots/slides of the text linked to, of
course), and share how to provide more analysis for the web environment,
how you have to have unique text for every locator and how you have to
more specific locators for your index entries.
Presenter Pilar Wyman
is a professional freelance indexer who specializes in preparing indexes
for print and electronic publication. She has been involved in indexing
since late 1983, and has been writing indexes since 1990. She is a founding
member of the ASI website committee and the Science-Medicine SIG of ASI
Editor, KeyWords, bulletin of ASI; and past Chair of the Washington, DC
Chapter of ASI. When her schedule permits, she gives training workshops
and presentations on indexing and related topics.
4. So you've created the index, now how do you get the locators
to link on the web site?
The presenter will exhibit a real-life situation of an index, Rochester
History Index, created in CINDEX and how its locators were transformed
into ones that link to the text in the web site, using HTML/Prep another
program AddLinks to take the "print" locators and create the
anchor targets to link to the text.
Presenter David K. Ream is
Leverage Technologies’ chief consultant for publishers. He has a
B.S. in Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from Case Western
Reserve University. Mr. Ream has spent over 30 years working with publishers
in the areas of typesetting design and production, database creation,
editorial systems, and electronic publication design and production. One
of Mr. Ream’s earliest assignments (in the mid-seventies) involved
creating custom programs to sort legal indexes into locator order and
then back into alpha order. Since then he has worked on many indexing,
abstracting, and thesaurus projects and systems. Currently, indexing projects
center around integrating Indexing Research’s Cindex into corporate
and governmental publishing operations including web applications. LevTech
also performs computer consulting and programming for editorial applications
as well batch composition services.
5. XRefHT32 - Freeware to assist in human indexing of Web documents (handout)
Brief demonstration and summary of the main Web indexing features of the
XRefHT32 program by its creator, including automatic extraction of titles,
keywords, and headings, application of a thesaurus, and Web index generation.
Update on the current state of the project.
Presenter Timothy C. Craven,
the developer of XRefHT32, is a Professor in
the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western
Ontario. He has published more than 60 articles in the areas of Web page
description and computer-assisted indexing, abstracting, and thesaurus
construction. He currently teaches online courses in the graduate Library
and Information Science program in Web design and architecture, in managing
Internet information services, and in subject analysis and thesaurus construction.
Panel Moderator:
Heather Hedden is a freelance indexer and principal
of Hedden Information Management. In addition to indexing, she teaches
online workshops in web site indexing through Simmons College Graduate
School of Library and Information Science and on her own. Previously she
was a senior vocabulary editor with Thomson Gale. Heather also heads ASI’s
Web Indexing SIG and is currently president of the New England Chapter
of ASI.