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Heartland Chapter of the American Society for Indexing

Staying Relevant in the Digital Landscape

8/30/2016

 
By Roseann Biederman

Traditionalists. Baby Boomers. Gen Xers. Millennials. While these terms are merely descriptors for specific generations, they can seem almost pejorative in a workplace context. That’s because these groups bring their unique priorities and communication styles to work; and when they interact, the result is often miscommunication and decreased productivity.


For indexers, who mostly enjoy autonomy and a buffer zone from corporate drama, generation gaps may seem like a remote concern. But as the world at large—and the world of work, in particular—gets smaller and moves faster, we can stay adaptable and relevant by expanding both our perspectives and our skill sets.

In the Millennial-driven digital landscape, for example, we can foster positive collaboration with editors, publishers, and authors by embracing their key technologies and learning to “speak their language.” In turn, we may enjoy more success in our repeat business and in our marketing efforts. The following books offer practical advice for surviving and thriving in the twenty-first century workplace. 
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Bridging the Generation Gap
Shaw, Haydn. Sticking Points: How to Get 4 Generations Working Together in the 12 Places They Come Apart. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. 2013. 

If you’ve read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you’ll recognize many aspects of its focus on the synergy between individual and organizational effectiveness in this guide.

Through twenty years of teaching The 7 Seven Habits of Highly Effective People training program, author Haydn Shaw learned that coping with generational differences is a significant pain point for organizations and individuals. “Generational friction is inevitable today because we’ve never before had four generations in the workplace,” he says.


Through extensive research (including thousands of individual interviews), Shaw identified twelve tension points that consistently surface in a multigenerational workplace. These findings, combined with numerous (often witty) anecdotes and “ghost stories” that provide a detailed profile of each generation, reveal why we all approach work differently, and why it matters.

Whether you identify as a Traditionalist (born before 1945), a Baby Boomer (born 1946–1964), a Gen Xer (born 1965–1980), or a Millennial (born 1981–2001), as an indexer you’ve likely encountered one of these key “sticking points” in your business:

     • Communication (“What is the best way to interact with my coworkers?”)
     • Feedback (“How often and in what ways do I want input?”)
     • Meetings (“What should happen in our meetings?”)
     • Training (“How do I learn best?”)

Shaw carefully analyzes each sticking point from a generational perspective, then provides five steps for leading through (versus correcting) them. He stresses that it’s important to avoid the urge to “fix” other generations, since each group has many positive attributes. “Stuck in the past or sticking together going forward: it’s a matter of turning a potential liability into an asset,” he says in Chapter One.


While the book’s primary focus is working through differences to improve communication, team-building, and productivity within an organizational/enterprise setting, it provides plenty of insights and strategies for individuals and families. 


Preparing for Tomorrow’s Workplace
Willyerd, Karie and Barbara Mistick. Stretch: How to Future-Proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2016. 

Even if indexing is our sole employment and we’ve never considered another career path, we should probably keep our options open. This imperative to push past our comfort zones and stay relevant in an increasingly unpredictable future workplace (whatever our profession) is the premise of Stretch.

The authors combine their academic and corporate experience with hard data on workplace trends to give us a taste of what’s to come in the global workplace. Their Workforce 2020 research revealed that the rapidly changing work world is on many people’s minds: “Around the world, the number one concern people expressed was that their ability and skills to perform rapidly changing jobs would render them obsolete. Additionally, only 50 percent of the employees from the survey believe the skills they have today will be the skills they need just three years from now.”

Staying ahead of the curve, they say, requires that we “stretch how we learn, stretch to stay open in our thinking, stretch to build diverse networks and experiences, and stretch our motivation.”


Willyerd and Mistick identified seven megatrends that will significantly affect how we work in the not-too-distant future:

     1  Globalization
     2  Demographic shifts
     3  Big Data
     4  Emerging technologies
     5  Climate change
     6  Redefined jobs
     7  Complexity

The authors note that all of these trends threaten “to make many people and even experts in their fields obsolete.” Case studies of individuals who were faced with this unpleasant reality dramatically illustrate the point. The good news is that, by being proactive and adaptable, we can expand and secure our future career options. Three “Stretch Imperatives” (“It’s all on you,” You need options,” and “You have dreams”) are followed by five actionable “Stretch Practices” that teach us how to 


     1  Learn on the fly
     2  Be open to feedback and change
     3  Build diverse (and useful) networks
     4  Collect meaningful experiences
     5  Bounce forward after setbacks


These skills have value beyond their role in career development, according to the authors. "Studs Terkel, author and Pulitzer Prize winner, said, 'Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.'”

Stretch concludes with a comprehensive Supplemental Materials list featuring “Research Methodology,” “Essential Books to Learn More,” and extensive footnotes. 


If Everything Is Miscellaneous, What’s an Indexer’s Place in the World?

6/14/2016

 
By Carol Reed
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​The nagging question crops up regularly on indexing discussion lists: As more content goes digital, is there a future for indexing? And the responses predictably conclude: 1) Yes, the publishing industry is changing significantly; 2) In spite of the changes, there continues to be a stable demand for print books and indexes; and 3) It’s a good idea to keep developing related skill sets to hedge your bets anyway.

The less-discussed version of the question gets a bit existential: Am I becoming a relic of a dying medium? Is what I do still relevant? It’s unavoidable after you’re asked for the hundredth time, “Can’t they automate that?”

The nature of our work is extremely focused, so it’s important to step back now and then and look at the big picture. This is what I had in mind when I picked up David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Though written in 2007, the book is still a staple on information architecture reading lists.
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​Weinberger unseated some of my long-held biases about knowledge and organization.

Like many indexers, I love organizing things. Editing an index toward elegance is a satisfying task. I mocked the KonMari decluttering book, but my socks and kitchen towels are now stored vertically, and they make me happy. I’m pretty sure I picked up mosaic as a hobby only so I could sort stained glass and Italian smalti pieces in plastic bins by color.

Weinberger paints the digital content landscape as a powerfully functional disorder, contrasting it with previous organizational schemes (think physical products on store shelves, or card catalogues, indexes, or the Dewey Decimal system). Physical constraints have limited the way we organize and access information. There’s only so much shelf space in a brick-and-mortar store, only so many pages reasonably allotted for an index, only one location in my pre-digital photo albums for that snapshot of Grandma on the hayride. These systems he refers to as the first and second “orders of order.”

Digital information, on the other hand, can have many tags, and Weinberger calls it the third order of order. Third-order content doesn’t need to be filed into folders, or categorized by a single taxonomy. My photos can be in a virtual heap somewhere on Flickr, with multiple tags that allow me to find the same photo under “Upper Peninsula,” “beach,” “Uncle Bob,” or “2012.”  Geolocation, facial recognition, and algorithms that infer “Upper Peninsula” is probably equivalent to “U.P.” all expand the ways I can find my photos, beyond the tags I apply manually.

Despite the initial skepticism about crowd-sourced tagging and content creation, both have proven far more effective than anyone anticipated—not perfect, of course, but often pretty darned good, and far more democratic than expert-controlled content. Defenders of traditional editorial authority use Wikipedia far more than we like to admit, because the vast majority of the time, it answers our questions quickly and accurately, while being thoroughly transparent about the behind-the-scenes negotiations of passionate and often non-pedigreed contributors.

Digital information is a mess. And it works, much to the consternation of obsessive organizers everywhere. (Remember early articles about indexing the Internet? LOL.)

Is this the writing on the wall for second-order indexers? Probably not, at least not for a good while. There’s plenty of evidence that print publishing isn’t going away anytime soon [1], and UX-savvy ebook publishers will realize the potential for enhanced ebook indexes to become a value-added feature that delights readers [2].
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Admittedly, Weinberg locates book indexes as a pre-digital organizing scheme, and the book is about the positive disruption of the digital disorder. We’re the “before” in a “before and after” narrative. But even the descriptions of the first and second orders of order contain examples indexers will appreciate, like the Bettman Archive of historic photos, the Universal Alphabet, Mortimer Adler’s fight against alphabetization, alternate models for the periodic table of elements, problems with the Dewey Decimal System, and terminology from indexer Seth Maislin. The “before” portion of the book is actually pretty entertaining, if you’re an indexer or taxonomist.

Fortunately, the meat of the book—Weinberger’s focus on the third order—does not argue that the first and second orders will become obsolete. Rather, he makes the case that the digital disorder affects not only the way we find information, but also the way we understand knowledge itself. Third-order knowledge, he asserts, is grassroots, iterative, commoditized, and metadata driven, upsetting the power structures and categories of the past. And it becomes harder to define what constitutes a topic, or topic mastery, when you can slice it up so many ways. These are the landscape changes that may not affect the day-to-day work of indexers, but on the meta-level they affect our clients, our readers, and the context in which we work.

As algorithms advance, you can bet the digital disorder—the third order of order—will only become more powerful and more useful. Compulsive organizers like me will need to let it go and take solace in our sock drawers and elegant indexes [3]. But keeping an eye on the evolving content landscape is always a good idea, and since Everything Is Miscellaneous speaks especially well to an indexer’s sensibilities, it’s a great place to start.
 
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[1] See Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows for a discussion of digital vs print reading comprehension. Carr’s  article “Paper Versus Pixel” gives an overview of why print is unlikely to go away, and Frank Catalano’s article “Paper Is Back” compares recent print and digital book sales.

[2] See the ASI Digital Trends Task Force recommendations for ebook indexes.

[3] Regrettably, the index to Everything Is Miscellaneous contains long spans of undifferentiated locators, which I found frustrating. It does, however, include a few silly, self-reflective, and thoroughly miscellaneous entries in the traditional format.

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