AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INDEXERS (ASI) MEETINGS
DIARY 8526
4/30/74
THIRD ANNUAL ASI ALL-DAY MEETING (MY FIRST)
Chat with Peter Rooney during registration until 10:40, when the first session starts, and they announce they have 234 members. Not much of REAL interest during the business meeting. At 12:15 an intelligent Laurie Sullivan talks about the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 2800 pages, 497 page index that took 27 man-months. At 12:35 a rather unpleasant Otto Lindenmeyer talked about the indexing of the Negro almanac, 1024 pages, 36-page index for 8 man-months. All the "in" people were elected again. Fred and I talked about gay stuff during lunch, Dee Atkinson fluttered around, Barbara Preschel sat across from me, next to Fred, and chatted, and I told her how well I thought she ran the meeting. Then at 2:40 a dry and marble-mouthed Dr. Barbara Flood discussed a paradigm in Problem Solving for CONSIDERING indexing problems, looking at diagnostic categories of authorship, publishing operations, and indexing operations, under which she isolated management problems, managing the indexers, document problems, and types of indexes, under which she discussed selecting terms and categorizing items, bound up with semantics, pragmatics, syntactics, and the meaning of meaning. Wha? Talk of "the Kyle method" named after Barbara Kyle. Liz Stalcup (rather a snippy old lady) and Peter Rooney talked about "Getting Started," saying that indexers are made not born, but they're BORN to be MADE. "Collison is classic," she said, but Atkinson disagreed with her. LMP for names you write to to get jobs, and Rooney trots out his old TECHNIQUES for indexing and five references per page that Dee Atkinson's Indexer Finances group pooh-poohed. But we seven in that group wasted our time, saying the basic $1 per book page was low, needed sliding scale in addition; England is beginning to undercut US prices by 50% (though their work is lousy, all agreed); and everyone REPEATED the need for contacts, letters, and phone calls for starting out; the need for an indexing manual, and I at least learned that NEXT year I wouldn't sit with Dee Atkinson, though I was told to get in touch with her to learn about how to find hours/day/line/entry for estimating parameters from HER. I COULD become a power here, but I CHOOSE not to! It just isn't the CENTER of my concern at this point (until I NEED MORE MONEY, probably!).
DIARY 9541
4/22/75
SECOND ASI ALL-DAY MEETING NOTES
Barnes: rare-data-first indexes. Census reports: 36 FEET of paper on a reference shelf. Approximately 200,000,000 data items, with 10 times as many on summary tapes, 800 to a page, about 1/4 million sheets. Purpose of index is to take any inquiry, look at the index, find a locator, and get to the collection of 1100 reports. Inquiry: What % of women (over 20, ever married) lived in Juneau, Alaska as of April 1, 1970. This breaks as follows:
1) This collection of data is ALL for 1970.
2) Index doesn't list geographical areas (treatment of areas is STANDARD in series)
3) Persons are considered as units (as are families, couples, buildings, tracts, etc.
4) Look at age and marital status, these are universe restrictors.
5) FORM of statistics given: $, %, frequency, ratio, etc.
VARIABLES are marital status, sex, and age: search for THIS tabulation and get the element needed from it.
Originally, 95 pages of index for a 40-page report (a/b/c/d; a/c/b/d---24 possible)
Barnes reduced to the 4 summaries of page 6 of #18.
Datum, PARAGRAPH index will make an average of 8% longer in extended form.
Median salary $12,000, some $10,000, some $15,000, some $20,000 = school librarian.
Peter Rooney: $1/page; .35 for line; others: at LEAST $6/hour.
Bauer: 600 items from a Sunday Times; abstracts limited to 3000 characters.
New York Times Information Bank: 1,000,000 abstracts; 500/day Times; 2000/week others.
4-5 descriptors/abstract. From January 1, 1969 for NYT; from 1971 for others.
Yearly index has ms of 45,000 computer printed pages.
24 indexes per year, each 180 pages; all work of 24 indexers reviewed by 5 editors daily. 20-40 million clippings in morgue.
IBM 370-65 and 3330 disks for storage. Weight of 4 is "regular," 6 is "Boldface"
John Rothman, IBM, and 3 programmers designed and maintain system.
Brooklyn Public Library HAS a terminal for public use, none at NY Times.
FIND, Information Clearinghouse, sells this service; currently 60 journals.
Phone # and *-button GETS to system monitor, can give you info on YOUR terminal!
WHEEL 3 [Paragraph-sign] (Scientist) [300 of these] will GET list of possible names.
°°° after Volume # is early edition; ° is later; + and ++ are still later editions of New York Times.
