2009 Annual Conference

Scaling the Heights
April 23–25, 2009
DoubleTree - Lloyd Center Hotel
Portland, Oregon

Portland News and Notes
February 2009

An occasional report on ASI conference planning
for our Portland meeting, April 23–25, 2009

Conference Housekeeping

The train to Portland: Carolyn Weaver, past-president and longtime Seattle area resident, tells me she’s taking the train from Seattle to Portland rather than driving; she says the service is great, the fees are reasonable, and it saves the cost of parking in town (even though we’ve got a great $3 a day/$9 a night parking rate for conference attendees). For those who are interested, the Seattle to Portland fare is currently $28 each way—$56 round trip for adults, or $47.60 round trip for those age 62+. If you’re flying in, it may be worth checking fares from your home city to Seattle—in some situations it would be much cheaper to fly to Seattle and take the train down to Portland. See http://tickets.amtrak.com/itd/amtrak for schedule options.

Booking a hotel room: If you tried to book a double-bedded hotel room at the Doubletree Hotel in Portland online, and were told none were available, we’ve sorted out that glitch. When you entered the “ASO” conference code, you probably put it in the promotion code box rather than in the group/convention box. We now have a special, ASI-dedicated web page for the hotel, which you can link to from the conference pages of the ASI website. If you have already booked your room and want to change the room type, you should be able to do so from this webpage (or call the hotel to sort it out). We’ve also added some suite options.

In and around Portland: If you hadn’t heard, you can take the MAX, Portland’s mass transit system, directly from the Portland airport to the conference hotel. For those flying into Portland and planning to use MAX, you can check out the MAX line schedules online at http://trimet.org/max. The best line to take from the airport to the Lloyd Center is the Red Line (no transfers). When you go to the Max page above, click on the Red Line link, and you can plan your trip from there. There’s an interactive map where you can plan your exact route. For example, if you’re traveling from the airport to the conference hotel, you can type in the airport as your departure point and then Lloyd Center as your arrival point. When you type in Lloyd Center, a list of locations will display; one is the Doubletree Lloyd Center. The closest stop to the hotel is the NE 11th Avenue Station, which is a 0.15 mile walk to the hotel.

Conference Seminars

Looking for a speaker: Unfortunately one of our speakers has had to drop out, so we will be changing Seminars 4 and 11 on the current preliminary program (check it out on ASI’s website). Seminar 11 will be replaced by a short disquisition on “Automatic Indexing” from Seth Maislin, which will be of special interest to the taxonomists amongst you. We’ll post a description for this seminar around March 1. I am still looking for a replacement speaker for Seminar 4. This is a “knotty bits” session, so it will be short (45 minutes, with perhaps 20–30 minutes of presentation and the rest of the time for discussion). If you would like to talk on the topics of “Indexing Illustrative Material” or “When to Index or Not Index a Name,” or if you have a bone to pick or a point to make about any other indexing conundrum that you wrestle with regularly, please contact me ASAP at kmertes@hotmail.com.

Panelists announced: Seminar 27, “Working With Authors and Editors,” now has two additional panel members. In addition to Carol Fisher Saller, an experienced copyeditor from University of Chicago Press and our keynote speaker, and Fred Leise, current ASI president and lead author of ASI’s current hot seller, Indexing for Editors and Authors: A Practical Guide to Understanding Indexes, we will have Marianne Keddington-Lang, an acquisitions editor with the University of Washington Press, and Sami Scripter, a cookbook author who has worked closely with indexers, including our own Cheryl Landes. Here’s a description of her most recent production: “... a lovely combination of Hmong recipes, intertwined with beautiful stories, poems, and anecdotes about the Hmong culture in Asia and America.” Biographical information about these new speakers will be added to the preliminary program soon.

The Naked Indexer: Workshop 6, “The Naked Indexer,” offers an unusual opportunity to observe and explore the techniques used by an experienced indexer. During the course of the workshop, presenter Fred Leise will bare all, as it were, as he indexes a selection of a scholarly work he has never before seen. You will be able to watch the process of indexing happening in real time and see the resulting index change and grow during the course of the session. For potential attendees, you can view or download the text from the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the process of building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, it provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. The text we are using is licensed for public use under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, and is entitled Environmental Effects of the Coffee Crisis: A Case Study of Land Use and Avian Communities in Agua Buena, Costa Rica, by Eve Rickert. To access the text, go to www.archive.org and enter the title in the search dialogue box. You can view or download the file as a pdf.

Kate Mertes
February, 2009

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