Within the indexing societies, the achievements of outstanding members of the profession are recognised by a variety of awards. These awards are often presented during the societies’ annual conferences and are duly reported in The Indexer throughout the year in conference reports. They are gathered together here for an overview of the awards and their latest recipients in 2025.
Six years after their last residential conference, indexers gathered in Birmingham, in the Heart of England, for ‘The Heart and Mind of Indexing’, the Society of Indexers 2025 conference. With a mixture of plenary sessions and breakout groups, plus plenty of opportunities for informal networking, the three-day event ranged widely, from artificial intelligence to emotional indexing – the heart and mind of the human indexer. In this article, a member of the organising committee considers the advantages of in-person conferences and summarises the programme content.
For two book indexing conferences in 2025, eight indexers prepared full indexes to the same book, then discussed their decision-making processes and the challenges they faced. This article builds on those initial conversations by performing an in-depth analysis of the eight indexes with the aim of showing what we can learn from this kind of exercise. It considers index structure, usability, and how to tackle conundrums like fictional names. As part of the process, it also examines whether regional differences are detectable between the five North American and three British indexers in the work they produced.
Freelance book indexers have to sort out not only what goes in the index, but also how much to charge for their indexing services. This article provides a step-by-step process that book indexers can use to determine how much money they ought to charge for an indexing project, taking into account personal budgets, business expenses, and project-specific concerns such as rush jobs and expertise.
