Society of Indexers Coffee Morning Zoom meeting

16th January 2025, 11am-12pm

On behalf of the Society of Indexers (SI), the professional body representing book indexers in the UK and Ireland, members of the CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group are invited to attend a Coffee Morning Zoom meeting with indexers that is taking place on Thursday 16th January at 11am-12pm UK time.

The Society of Indexers holds these meetings every month as a chance for indexers to catch up on "the 3Gs – gossip, gripes and good news". They are very informal, and nobody is required to present anything, or even to talk, unless they so wish.

This time, things are going to get emotional. Why are emotional topics seemingly taboo in indexes? What role do our emotions play in the indexing process? Are there such things as soft texts or is the idea just soft?

At the SI’s online conference last September, Alan Rutter led peer review sessions on Wendell Berry's two essays published under the title Why I am not going to buy a computer. It's fair to say that this text taxed the emotional neutrality of all the indexer participants. I will be basing some of the discussion of emotions in indexing on the peer review indexes, and Alan will be there to talk about the exercise more generally. You can read the first essay in pdf format and discover why it challenged us:

https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/berry-computer.pdf

The Zoom link will be shared with registered attendees one day before the event.