Assignment 1

A Reading Journal, with Abstracts and Access Terms for all Articles

20% graded, informally graded

Due March 7

Besides being a packet of informative readings for the class, one should also view the packet of readings as an assortment of items (information entities) that you have collected about the topic and subtopics of indexing. They will be useful in the order provided as a list of sources, but to find anything in them with any proficiency, one would have to have a way of consulting them. Suppose, for example, that one wanted to be able to go immediately to anything in the packet about web indexing, or about online indexing, or about some other specific feature of indexing. In order to do that, you would need either a table of contents or, even better, a brief index to the packet. Moreover, in order to get some sense of each item, it would be helpful to have a summary (i.e., an abstract) of what each item is about, no matter how brief the item is. For that reason, one of the practice elements of this class is to index and write abstracts for the packet of reading items themselves. A subsidiary value of this assignment is that you will have an index for the writings for future use.

INFORMALITY OF THE ASSIGNMENT: PLEASE NOTE -- at the beginning of this class and even to March 7th, making any sort of formal index and writing well-done formal abstracts is a "future" thing. The purpose for taking the entire course is to learn how to do that. What we are hoping to accomplish here by asking you to do this assignment right up front (with no experience behind you) is to "get your feet wet" in the indexing experience. Thus, we do not look upon the final product of this assignment as some sort of finished, expert thing, but rather as a beginnerÕs attempt to get used to the idea of indexing and writing abstracts. Thus, the assignment will not be graded in the usual way, on the basis of some sort of refined quality, but rather, simply that you have completed it as good as you could. In short, the assignment will not be scored on the usual sliding scale that represents quality, but rather simply on the basis of how you have completed the task, no matter what the quality on a formal scale; that you in effect showed interest and good faith in doing so.

As a result, the assignment will be graded in a limited way. If you complete the assignment in good faith -- writing reasonable summaries for each item, compiling at least some reasonably useful terms for each item, and then making an integrated alphabetical list of those terms, you will receive all of the points allowed for this assignment in the course. [It is worth 20% of the course grade. Getting all of the points means you essentially get an A+ for the effort.] If, however, the work is done in a manner that suggests you expended little care on it, where the summaries, for example, show little progression in form and precision from the first to the last item, and where terms chosen appear to be carelessly picked out, and if the final list suggests that something poorly or incompletely done, the score for the assignment will be lowered to 15. [That would be tantamount to getting a C on the assignment.] We would hope the latter does not occur. In the end, you can make as much of this as you want, for it will be for your own use that you ultimately are doing the work. If the assignment is not completed at all, you will receive no points for it.

GENERAL PROCEDURE.

1) The items in your packet are not presently numbered. The first thing you should do is to number them according to the list that follows, so that everyone divides them up in the same way.
2) Read through the items in the order found. As you are reading, do steps 3 & 4 for each item.
3) For each item, write a summary (i.e., an abstract) that is as terse and to the point as you can make it. It can be written either in indicative or informative form, and given the need to figure out how to write each of these two kinds, one might try now one and now the other of these two forms. In short, use the assignment to practice writing the two kinds of abstracts.
4) Following each abstract, list 3 to 10 keywords which indicate the major subject focus or foci of the item, and also where appropriate, qualified by the form (for example, that it is a bibliography, that it is a chart or table or some such thing). Each keyword should include the master number of the item as found in the master list below. If the item is longer than a couple of pages, you may well wish to indicate the specific page number within the item to which the keyword or term used is pointing. For example, if one indexes two different items for the term Synonyms, then they might be listed as

Synonyms 62, 65 (p. 3)

Here, "62" and "65" mean items 62 and 65 [hypothetical, there are none numbered so high in the packet], and for item 65, you are referring to p. 3 of that particular item.
5) When you have completed all of the items, make a single list of all of the keywords. You can do this most effectively by copying and pasting them into a single list which you then could sort by, say, the Word command for sorting.
6) Turn in the Assignment in final form:

LIST OF ITEMS

01 Web Style Guide. (3p) [This is a title page followed by selections from p. 47 and 238. It may be out of order in your packet]
02 How to Index Windows-based Online Help (by Susan Holbert). [This item is actually from a chapter in Web Style Guide, the 1st item here. Write the title and author provided here on it. The entire chapter is on this topic. You simply have pp. 91-97 from the chapter.]
03 Organizing Your Site from A-Z. (4p)
04 Indexes: An Old Tool for a New Medium (by Kevin Broccoli). (8p)
05 Application Note: Insights on In-Site Searching (5p)
06 WWW -- Wealth, Weariness or Waste (by David Batty) (7p)
07 Vocabulary Links://Thesaurus Design for Information Systems (by B. H. Weinberg) (7p)
08 Building a Synonymous Search Index (by Peter Morville) (3p)
09 How Do You Build a Thesaurus? (by Peter Morville) (2p)
10 Thesaurus Design Seminars (2p -- from St. John's University, NYC) [The 2d p. illustrates a seminar for which a tape may be purchased. Write the title provided here on the item.]
11 ASI -- Thesaurus Information (2p)
12 ASI -- How do I Build a Thesaurus (2p)
13 ASI -- Thesaurus Management Software (2p)
14 National Information Standards Organization (2p)
15 ASI -- Indexing the Web (5p)
16 Complexity in Indexing Systems (by B. H. Weinberg) (12p)
17 Navigation (4p) [A list of articles available in Webreview.com]
18 Resources on Thesaurus Construction and Vocabulary Management (1p)
19 Web Indexing Tools (by Kevin Broccoli) (3p)
20 Author-created Indexes vs. Third-party Professional Indexes (by Seth Maislin) (2p)
21 HTML Indexerª Frequently Asked Questions (7p)
22 WWW Indexing (6p) [This is a clickable list of Web sites and sources, found at the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, University of British Columbia. The URL for this list is http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/arstlibr512/winter2000/www1.html
23 Software for Indexing (3p) [A list of articles from ASI's Key Words, a print publication]
24 What's Going on in IndexingÑReferences (by Nancy Mulvany) (2p) [Write the title here on this item]
25 Good Online Indexing: It Doesn't Happen Automatically (by R. Berry, R. Earle, and M. C. Nichols) (3p)
26 Your First Online Index (10p)
27 Index Usability Test Questions (by Lori Lathrop) (2p) [You may have another copy of B. H. Weinberg's "Complexity in Indexing Systems" at this point. If so, discard it. You have already treated it in no. 16 above. The only difference between the two is that this version has a slightly larger typeface size.]
28 Megamoney Metatags (by Laura Fillmore) (4p)
29 Does Your Web Site Need an Index? (by Steve Outing) (6p)
30 Seth Maislin, O'Reilly Indexing Guru (by Lori Houston) (5p) [You may find a copy of S. Maislin's "Author-Created Indexes vs. Third-Party Professional Indexes" here. It duplicates no. 20 above, but it is from a different source here. Discard it, though you may wish to write the URL for this version on no. 20.]
31 Indexing Online (by Seth Maislin) (3p)
32 What Exactly is "Online Indexing"? (by Seth Maislin) (5p)
33 How Deep Should an Index Be? (by Seth Maislin) (3p)
34 A Usability Assessment of Online Indexing Structures in the Networked Environment (by C. A. Hert, E. K. Jacob, and P. Dawson) (13p)
35 Editing Indexes (by Fred Brown) (9p)

You have other readings in the packet from Indexing Books by Nancy C. Mulvany, from The Art of Indexing by Larry S. Bonura, and from Beyond Book Indexing, ed. by D. Brenner and M. Rowland. You should read these, of course, but do not include them in this Assignment.