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Conference Program
The program includes individual presentations as well as round-table and panel discussions with an emphasis on building practical skills.
Conference and Program Committee: Karen Gillen, Mary Coe, Sherrey Quinn
The details of sessions listed below may be subject to change
THURSDAY 29 October
8.30 – 8.50am Registration
9.00 – 9.10am Welcome address — Mary Coe, ANZSI Vice President and Conference Co-Chair
9.15 – 9.50am Keynote #1 ‘ The Index as a Closely Read Text’ — Jolanta Komornicka
10.00 – 10.20am Morning Tea
10.25 – 11.10am ‘What Happens When Indexers Meet Wikidata? Library and Information Science (LIS) WikiProject Update’ — Annie Reynolds & Joy Nettleton
11:15 –12:00pm ‘From foundation to future: The case of the Australian Education Index’ — Pru Mitchell
12.00 – 12.55pm Lunch (plus ‘Meet and Greet’ for new indexers)
1.00 – 1.45pm Indexing Worldwide: ICRIS and the International Indexers website — Madeleine Davis
1.50 – 3.00pm ‘Getting the Most from Your Indexing Software’. Concurrent roundtable discussion sessions: CINDEX – Frances Lennie, Discussion leader; SKY Index – Sherrey Quinn, Discussion leader
3.00 – 3.20pm Afternoon Tea
3.25 – 4.25pm ‘Indexing Resources’ — Mary Coe & Sherrey Quinn; discussion session
4.30 – 5.00pm ANZSI AGM
—–oo0oo—–
6:00pm Informal Dinner, followed by trivia competition, Thirsty Crow brew/pub, 153 Fitzmaurice Street, Wagga Wagga
FRIDAY 30 October
8.30 – 8.50am Registration
9.00 – 9.45am Keynote #2 ‘ Indexing as an Applied Hermeneutic Framework for Meaning Construction and Interpretive Practice’ — Yazdan Mansourian
10.00 – 10.20am Morning Tea
10.25 – 11.15am ‘Indexing Efficiently’ — Max McMaster
11.15 –12.00pm Special interest groups; small group discussions
12.00 – 12.55pm Lunch
1.00 – 2.35pm ‘Subject Analysis and Term Selection’: Group indexing exercise — Glenda Browne & Jenny Browne
2.40 – 3.05pm Afternoon Tea
3.10 – 3.55pm ‘Indexing scholarship and new indexers’ — Mary Coe, Kerryn Burgess, Emma Coe and Joy Nettleton — Panel and discussion
4.00 –4.30pm Closing address — Mary Coe, Conference Co-Chair
—–oo0oo—–
6.00pm Conference Dinner – Magpies Nest Restaurant, 30 Pine Gully Road, Wagga Wagga (6pm Canapes on the terrace; 7pm Dinner)
Post-conference Workshops
Saturday 31 October, 9:00am-12:30pm
- Refresher Indexing Workshop Max McMaster (half day)
- Venue: Charles Sturt University Library
The workshop includes morning tea.
For participants who have forgotten some of their basic indexing skills this workshop will cover the essentials. It will also cover some more advanced indexing techniques to enhance their indexing knowledge. This workshop is not suitable for new indexers. Participants will be supplied with an electronic workbook prior to the course, accessible from a secure area on the ANZSI website. They can either download the workbook onto their laptop or print the workbook out. For any queries or further information contact Max McMaster.
Bio: Max McMaster has been a freelance book indexer since the late 1980s, having compiled over 3000 indexes in a range of disciplines including the sciences, mathematics, environment, business, economics, cooking, travel and government reporting. He has been awarded the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) Medal for book indexing on three occasions. He was an instructor for the University of California, Berkeley Extension indexing course from 2010–2022.
Register here or with the Registration link at the top of this page.
Saturday 31 October, 9:00am-12:30pm
- Wagga Wagga Wiki Workshop (half day)
- Venue: Charles Sturt University Library
The Wiki Workshop will be a collaborative event where people work together to write and improve Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. Mentors will be on hand to support participants in contributing to topics of interest: from biographies, local history, library and information science or indexing. New wiki editors are advised to attend from the start as training will be presented at the beginning. The event is free but please register here for catering purposes. Morning tea and coffee and light refreshments will be provided.
Any enquiries – please contact the ANZSI Secretary.
Speaker Abstracts and Bios – Day 1, 29 October 2026
‘The Index as a Closely Read Text’ (Keynote 1)
Jolanta Komornicka
While we often focus on how to create (or write) indexes, there’s less attention to how to read like an indexer, though we all do it and the various training curricula work hard to instil this fundamental skill. In my keynote, I will explore what it means to read like an indexer using the framework of the technique of close reading. Close reading is foundational to literary studies and is the practice of making an argument based on close attention to a text. Indexers rarely think of their indexes as arguments (though we’re happy to argue about the right way to create them), but at a fundamental level that is what indexes are; they prioritize information, make connections between components, and guide a reader to conclusions (even if that conclusion is “I really need to know what the author has to say about the hamburger theory of indexer economics on page 79”). Beginning with an overview of what close reading is, the mechanics of how it works, I apply the principles and practices of close reading to the creation of an index, using it to explore what it means to first read like an indexer, then how our reading shapes the way we write as indexers.
Bio: Jolanta N. Komornicka indexes books in the academic humanities and social sciences and teaches indexing at Library Juice Academy. Past president of the Indexing Society of Canada/Société canadienne d’indexation, she is a researcher at heart and always interested in questions of process and praxis when it comes to indexing books.
What Happens When Indexers Meet Wikidata? Library and Information Science (LIS) WikiProject update
Annie Reynolds and Joy Nettleton
Annie and Joy will provide an overview of the original partner project between Wikimedia Australia, Charles Sturt University and ANZSI from 2024. They will share how the project has evolved over time and developed in terms of both participants and focus. The presentation will include some tips for Wikidata editing as well as highlight some of the key library and information science history represented on Wikipedia.
After this session, conference participants are encouraged to talk to us and other Wikimedians to find out more about what we do and help us both create and improve Wiki entries for indexers and other library and information science professionals. In addition, there is the Wagga Wagga Wiki Workshop (WWWW) to be held on Saturday morning (31/10/26) which will provide a hands-on experience and is suitable for both new and experienced Wiki editors.
Bios: Annie Reynolds is a Wikimedian who has been editing English Wikipedia for 12 years, focusing on Australian literature and creating biographies of Aussie women. These days, she is more active on the structured database Wikidata, but enjoys “mixed farming”, i.e. working across a number of the Wiki platforms, including Wikimedia Commons (images) and Wikisource (text transcriptions). She has a BA from ANU with a history major.
Joy Nettleton is a final year Master of Information Studies student at Charles Sturt University. She was a recipient of the inaugural ANZSI Indexing Scholarship in 2025 and undertook the UC Berkeley Extension Indexing: Theory and Application course. Joy is an active member of Wikimedia Australia and contributor to their Diversity, Inclusion and Safety Subcommittee. She first began contributing to Wikidata in June 2025 and is new to the indexing world. This is her first ANZSI Conference.
‘From foundation to future: The case of the Australian Education Index’
Pru Mitchell
The Australian Education Index has been an active part of Australia’s indexing landscape throughout ANZSI’s 50-year history. This presentation celebrates that shared history and the value of indexing, particularly in education and research. It also considers questions facing us now: Are indexes too niche, too nerdy for today’s world? What’s with our legacy software and metadata schemas? What about AI? What are the technical and governance challenges involved in setting our data free or migrating to new platforms?
Bio: Pru Mitchell is Manager of Information Services at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), where she leads the team responsible for production of the Australian Education Index and the Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors (ATED). She contributes to the advancement of linked data and capacity building through Wikidata outreach activities, and is an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University.
‘Indexing Worldwide: ICRIS and the International Indexers website’
Madeleine Davis
Ever since the foundation of the first indexing society in modern times, the various societies and networks have been in communication with one another. Relationships were formalised in 1999 through an international agreement and terms of reference for the International Committee of Representatives of Indexing Societies (ICRIS), and a regular series of face-to-face ICRIS meetings were held at conferences. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of online meetings, which further cemented international communication and led to the attendance by all society/network representatives at biannual Zoom meetings, the idea of establishing an international indexing website emerged. This session will describe the establishment of ICRIS and the long gestation period of the new ‘Indexing Around the World’ website, highlighting the way in which ICRIS members contributed ideas, enhancements, additions and amendments that brought the project to fruition in a constructive, collegial way.
Bio: Madeleine Davis has been a back-of-the-book and loose-leaf indexer with the Australian Society of Indexers (AusSI), later the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI), since 1995, specialising in biography and legal indexing. She has, over the years, also ‘morphed’ into a web surfer and Project Officer with AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute), an online free-access resource for Australian legal information, in a team responsible for the development and maintenance of indexes to legal materials — legislation, treaties, decisions of courts and tribunals and law journals. She was a lecturer for online legal research in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) from 2001 to 2006. She has also been co-general editor for Thomson Reuters’ Online Currents legal journal from 2008 to 2013. Madeleine is an Accredited Indexer with ANZSI and was ANZSI President from 2017 to 2025. She is currently retired from full-time indexing but has been lured back occasionally to index books too good to resist!
‘Getting the Most from Your Indexing Software’
Concurrent round-table sessions: CINDEX – Frances Lennie, Discussion leader; SKY Index – Sherrey Quinn, Discussion leader
CINDEX — In this session Frances will cover the original program’s development (for PC and Mac; Publisher’s Edition) and the reasoning behind why it moved to ‘open source’. Frances will also explain how user support and product improvements are currently handled, and answer any questions attendees may have. CINDEX can currently be accessed at www.OpenCindex.com
SKY Index — This will be a round-table discussion session, intended to provide an opportunity for SKY Index users to discuss software features, share tips and techniques, ask questions and get answers from the group.
Bios: Frances Lennie was the owner of Indexing Research, a full-service indexing company, and the developer of CINDEX, which is now an ‘open source’ product. Frances retired in April 2026 after 50 years of indexing: first for a UK publisher in England then, after moving to the USA in 1982, for American publishers coast to coast, working primarily on medical and educational works. Frances is a Life Member of the American Society for Indexing (ASI), having served on the ASI Board, serving two terms of Treasurer and two terms as President.
Sherrey Quinn is a librarian, library consultant and free-lance indexer. During her career Sherrey has managed or participated in numerous indexing projects, and has been an ANZSI Accredited Indexer since 1992. Sherrey has been awarded the ANZSI John Simkin Medal and two ANZSI Highly Commended certificates for book indexes. She was an office-bearer in ANZSI ACT Region Branch, has been a member of ANZSI Council since 2016 and is also the Book Review Co-Editor for the Journal of the Australia Library and Information Association. Currently Sherrey works on information management and indexing projects that interest her, now mostly specialising in indexing scholarly books.
‘Indexing Resources’ – discussion session
Mary Coe and Sherrey Quinn
In this session, we will discuss the many resources available for indexers to use in their work. We will start with indexing textbooks, journals, and standards, then move into specific topics, such as indexing names and e-book indexing. We will also discuss resources for talking about indexing with clients, particularly AI-generated indexes. Audience participation will be welcome. Bring a list of your favourite resources to share.
Bio: Dr Mary Coe has been indexing for 30 years, working in a wide range of subject areas and formats, including books. She was awarded a PhD by CSU in 2022 for her thesis on how readers make sense of active e-book indexes. Mary is an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University, Editor of The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing, and Vice-President of ANZSI.
Speaker Abstracts and Bios – Day 2, 30 October 2026
‘Indexing as an Applied Hermeneutic Framework for Meaning Construction and Interpretive Practice’ (Keynote 2)
Yazdan Mansourian
Reading, at its core, is a process of making meaning of a text. In practice, readers do not simply move linearly from the beginning of a text to its end. Instead, they usually read selectively, return to the earlier sections, follow emerging thoughts, and connect ideas to shape their understanding. From a hermeneutic perspective, this non-linear movement reflects the hermeneutic circle where understanding develops through a continual interaction between the parts and the whole of a text, where each intuition shapes and reshapes the reader’s interpretation of the text. Therefore, meaning is not fixed and emerges through a dialogue between the reader and the text, influenced by their prior knowledge, expectations, and the context. In this presentation, I examine the role of indexing within this interpretive process and explain how indexers anticipate the reader’s movement through a hermeneutic circle by clustering related concepts and signalling conceptual relationships. In doing so, they do not simply guide navigation; they actively participate in shaping the conditions under which interpretation evolves. From this perspective, indexing is a practical form of hermeneutics. The indexer identifies what is meaningful, determines levels of significance, and articulates connections across the text. At the same time, the index remains open, does not close the process of meaning construction and creates multiple pathways of meaningful engagement with a text which is the heart of any hermeneutic inquiry.
Bio: Yazdan Mansourian is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University. He completed his PhD in Information Science at the University of Sheffield in 2006. Over the past twenty years, his research has centred on Human Information Behaviour (HIB), with a particular focus on its cognitive and emotional dimensions. Since 2017, he has developed an ongoing research program on HIB within the context of Serious Leisure. In this program he explores various aspects of information seeking, sharing and use in hobbies, voluntary works and amateur pursuits to understand how information experiences support engagement, sense of agency and belonging in recreational and leisure activities.
‘Indexing Efficiently’ – Panel Session
Max McMaster, Frances Lennie, Shelley Campbell
Indexing efficiently is important for all freelancers. With most indexing jobs you are working with time, budget and index length constraints, so any tips or practices that can speed up the indexing process is beneficial. For this session the three panellists will present their tips for boosting indexing efficiency based on their experience. Topics will include the benefits of importing index entries from a previous edition; starting the index of a difficult text with the easiest chapter, not necessarily chapter one; and, for school texts, indexing the glossary terms first. There will be many other topics.
Bios: Max McMaster has been a freelance book indexer since the late 1980s, having compiled over 3000 indexes in a range of disciplines including the sciences, mathematics, environment, business, economics, cooking, travel and government reporting. He has been awarded the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) Medal for book indexing on three occasions. He was an instructor for the University of California, Berkeley Extension indexing course from 2010–2022.
Frances Lennie retired in April 2026 after 50 years of indexing: first for a UK publisher in England then, after moving to the USA in 1982, for American publishers coast to coast, working primarily on medical and educational works. Frances is a Life Member of the American Society for Indexing (ASI), having served on the ASI Board, serving two terms of Treasurer and two terms as President. Frances was the owner of Indexing Research, a full-service indexing company, and the developer of CINDEX, which is now an ‘open source’ product.
Shelley Campbell is a freelance indexer of books, journals and reports in a wide range of subject areas, and a semi-retired law librarian. She has been working as a law librarian since 1991 and indexing since 2000. She has a B.App.Sc. in Information and Library Studies from Curtin University and is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Extension Indexing: Theory and Application course. Shelley has been an ANZSI member since (at least) 2007 and an ANZSI Council member since 2024.
Special Interest Groups — small group discussions
We will break into small discussion groups based on interest. Groups could discuss topics such as medical/scientific indexing, legal indexing, biography indexing, cookbook indexing, gardening indexing, scholarly book indexing. Those not interested in an indexing-related interest group can join the LIS WikiProject members to learn more about working in the Wikimedia spaces.
‘Subject Analysis and Term Selection’ group indexing exercise
Glenda Browne and Jenny Browne
In this session Glenda and Jenny will briefly look at the principles of subject analysis and term selection, with participation invited through group discussions. We will then work together to partially index a short document. Participants will receive the URL in advance, and are invited to index the work and submit it for comparison and integration into a group index before the conference. This has been an interesting exercise at past conferences as we see the different approaches that people take.
We will also work in small groups to look at some additional text relating to the topic to see how it can be integrated into the existing index.
If time permits, we will discuss issues including overindexing and underindexing, indexing for unknown users and needs, and the importance (or not) of consistency between indexers.
Bios: Glenda Browne has been a freelance indexer of books, journals, online help and websites since 1988. She has taught indexing-related courses for clients including ANZSI, Macleay College and UNSW. Glenda is co-author of The indexing companion and author of The indexing companion: book indexing. www.webindexing.com.au.
Jenny Browne has been indexing books, journals and reports since 2016. She has a BA in linguistics and completed a postgraduate diploma in Information Studies in 2025. Jenny has attended Australian and international conferences and has reported on these for the ANZSI Newsletter and The Indexer. She has also been the ANZSI Communications Officer since 2018.
‘Indexing scholarship and new indexers’ – Panel and discussion
Mary Coe will be joined by three ANZSI scholarship recipients, Kerryn Burgess, Emma Coe and Joy Nettleton. We will tap into the collective wisdom in the room as we ponder how to gain confidence, work with a mentor, and find those elusive first jobs. The benefits of ANZSI membership for newbies will also be considered – how can we better support our novice indexers?
Bios: Dr Mary Coe has been indexing for 30 years, working in a wide range of subject areas and formats, including books. She was awarded a PhD by CSU in 2022 for her thesis on how readers make sense of active e-book indexes. Mary is an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University, Editor of The Indexer: The International Journal of Indexing, and Vice-President of ANZSI.
Kerryn Burgess works mainly for trade publishers. She learned indexing while working as an editor at Lonely Planet in the 1990s, became accredited with ANZSI in 2018, and completed the UC Berkeley indexing course in 2026. She’s also accredited as an editor by the Institute of Professional Editors. Since leaving a full-time job at Gourmet Traveller magazine in 2012, Kerryn has combined freelance indexing and editing. Gardening titles, cookbooks and biographies are her favourite projects.
Emma Coe is a new indexer and a recent recipient of the ANZSI Indexing Scholarship. She is currently enrolled in the UC Berkeley Indexing: Theory and Application course. Emma has a background in digital media, completing a Bachelor Degree in Media Arts at the University of New South Wales in 2021. She also completed a Graduate Certificate in Audiovisual Archiving at Charles Sturt University in 2021. Emma provided videography services for the ANZSI conference in 2023 and will be doing so again for this year’s conference.
Joy Nettleton is a final year Master of Information Studies student at Charles Sturt University. She was a recipient of the inaugural ANZSI Indexing Scholarship in 2025 and undertook the UC Berkeley Extension Indexing: Theory and Application course. Joy is an active member of Wikimedia Australia and contributor to their Diversity, Inclusion and Safety Subcommittee. She first began contributing to Wikidata in June 2025 and is new to the indexing world. This is her first ANZSI Conference.