Over the past months I have stayed in touch with indexing colleagues through various events, both in-person and online.
In November 2025, I attended a Scotland Local Group meeting in Edinburgh. We visited the Writers’ Museum which houses collections relating to Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Six of us spent a happy hour exploring the artefacts including the Ballantyne Press, reputed to have been used for printing Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. After our visit to the museum we shared a very enjoyable meal of Spanish tapas in a restaurant nearby.
In April 2026, I attended a virtual conference hosted by the Indexing Society of Canada/Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI). The theme was ‘Sorting It Out’ and there was a varied programme covering everything from the latest information about developments in AI, an international review of indexing training courses, business-management advice on time-tracking and sub-contracting, and a keynote speaker discussing the origins of the alphabet. There was opportunity for networking and socialising, including breakout room discussions and a quiz. It was a good way to keep up-to-date with the latest indexing trends, while meeting and re-meeting indexers from around the world.
In June 2026, the Society of Indexers hosted their second ‘Supergroup’ meeting. These meetings have been developed to fill a gap because Local Groups are smaller and meetings are happening less often. The meeting was held in York and I combined it with a visit to relations who live in the region. Again, it was great to meet up socially with other indexers. We had a very tasty pub lunch followed by a printing workshop at Thin Ice Press. We learnt about the endangered craft of letterpress printing and we worked through the process of hand setting a quotation from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, with each of us adding half a line to the setting stick, letter-by-letter, including punctuation and spaces. The case layout was confusing at first, being in neither alphabetical or QWERTY order, but organised with the most frequently used letters in the biggest sections, and the capital letters on the right of the case.
Once the quotation was set, our workshop leader transferred it to a galley and added the extra spacing making it ready for printing. We began by printing a proof to check for any errors in our work. All eight of us had set our parts of the quotation correctly and we were ready to print. We added the paper by hand and rolled it across the top of the inked type creating our own print to take home as a souvenir.
