I’ve just given a huge sigh of relief, hit the send button on the e-mail with the attachments, and had an acute attack of nervousness–is there an error in there somewhere, did I miss something, is there…?

It’s been a long, but interesting, project.  I’ve prepared the index for a commemorative edition of The Polar Times.  It’s a collection of excerpts from articles from that publication, from newspapers–really a book of “passing mentions”–the highlights from 1935 to 2012.  Almost every page had multiple excerpts, so there were multiple entries from each page in many cases.  It’s been an interesting exercise determining what is a passing mention among all these passing mentions….

Working with Adobe Acrobat Pro XI was a huge help in this project.  I used the advanced search to help me verify the accuracy of locators, and to double-check that I’d included all the appropriate references.  Though there was not much markup on this project since it was rather “artsy”, I used Acrobat on other text-heavy, almost scholarly work to do my markup, and to track entries that I’ve already made in my indexing software.

Now I’m eager to attend Connie Binder’s workshop on “The Art and Craft of Using PDFs in the Indexing Process” at the ASI conference. Since I’m fairly new to working with Acrobat, I’m sure there are lots more ways to use it to make the indexing process even easier.