Do the books and other documents you index linger in memory long after the job is finished, influencing other aspects of your life? While most of the information we index slowly trickles away, there are a few times things I have indexed have changed my life.
When I couldn’t get paid in kind for indexing an encyclopedia on wine, we decided to invest some of the spoils in a wine company. Totally whimsical decision process led us to choose Petaluma, which dropped in price soon after, but is slowly clawing its way back up. Not daunted, when I read a positive review of a medical company that I had indexed for a website of innovative Australian companies we took the plunge, and to our joy Resmed is reaching higher day by day.
My knowledge of all the potential health problems we face has vastly increased since indexing a book on diseases, and I am daily grateful for all the illnesses that I don’t have. The same feeling comes from working in a hospital library, where occasional browsing through illustrated works shows diseases too visually hideous to contemplate. And we all moan and groan and head to the doctor for the slightest sniffle.
My feel for Sydney has increased through indexing books for tourists. One led me to Fagan Park in Arcadia. It is attractive and interesting, with eight separate gardens, each designed in the style of a different country. One of the most significant for me was the story of the building of the Opera House. Much as I admire it, and am glad we have it, my heart goes out to all those who midwived the protracted birth. Snippets that remain with me are the immensity even of the structural base (which was inspired by steps to Mexican pyramids), the fact that a historical building had to be demolished to make space for it, and the amazing concept that we could have had white sails with stripes of black tiles at the joins!
I know I am not alone in enjoying the books I work with. Mary Ann Chulik had the enviable task of indexing a series of mystery novels by Les Roberts. She wrote “I’m familiar with some of the restaurants mentioned in the books. Other mentions have been inspirational – I found a very good restaurant named Jack’s Deli from the references in two books of the series.” How nice to read, and index, about things in your local area. See the index at www.levtechinc.com.
This is all just one of the aspects of indexing that makes it such a “delicious” occupation (as Valerie from the UK said at the Canberra Indexers’ and Editors’ conference).
References: Chulik, Mary Ann (presented by David Ream). The mysteries of fiction indexing, pp48-54, in: The August Indexer: proceedings from the second international conference, Friday August 27 to Sunday August 29, 1999, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Ed. by Margaret Findlay. Melbourne: Australian Society of Indexers, 2000.
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