Book Indexing: A Real Thing Done By a Real Person

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A warning in advance – this is longer than my usual posts and the reason is, I get a LOT of questions about indexing. Hopefully this addresses most of them.

example of a book index

Any time I tell people I am an indexer, eyebrows are raised and/or knitted, questions are asked and heads are shaken. It is an unknown job to most people. To those who do know about it – such as the man I sat next to on my way to Rome a few year back – we can approach the status of myth (“I knew indexers were out there. I’ve just never seen one. I though you all were like unicorns.“)

Nope, we are real. We are not many in number but we are out there. And as a public service, I thought I’d answer some of the questions I frequently get about indexing. Continue reading “Book Indexing: A Real Thing Done By a Real Person” →

What a Content Audit Is, What It Isn’t and Why You Need One

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A recent client meeting trip into London got me thinking about content audits again – what they can do for a business or organisation, why they happen and why ‘audits’ and ‘inventories’ are NOT the same.

Content Audit

And as the topic keeps coming up, I thought it might be helpful to get it all down here. Continue reading “What a Content Audit Is, What It Isn’t and Why You Need One” →

Are You Managing Your Digital Landscape

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I recently nodded my way through an article about ‘digital estate sprawl’ because I’ve definitely seen a lot of it the last few years; especially as the phrase ‘digital transformation’ becomes more and more misunderstood as ‘just make it digital.’ And it’s not just in large organisations where you can see how and why it happens so easily.

Any size company can find itself with a digital footprint that has expanded more … organically than strategically. It’s an issue Imogen Hitchcock at Beaumont addresses in ‘Why websites are like gardens – a new approach to building website content‘ – but applied to an entire digital landscape instead of just one site.

And it’s not only the number of websites that creates the overgrowth. Continue reading “Are You Managing Your Digital Landscape” →

Searching Out Stock Photos

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Does the cost of stock photography sometimes leave you reeling? Join the club! I’ve been shopping for and using stock photos for over 25 years and the price tag can leave me speechless on occasion.

While cost is very often what sends people hunting for free or cheaper sources of stock photography, there’s another reason that becomes bigger as time goes on — lack of choice. Have you noticed the same pics showing up on multiple paid sites? Me too. There’s a particular coffee cup, for example, following me from 123RF to Dreamstime, Bigstock to Canstock, Shutterstock to Deposit and back again.

So I go hunting for something that doesn’t look like the same picture everyone else is using on their content about the same topics. And even if I don’t see them everywhere, shots on the major sites can be perfectly fine but … predictable. Technically good, of course, but safe, cookie cutter … boring.

Not surprising then that we attempt to escape high cost, repetitiveness and blandness by Googling phrases like “free stock photos” or “hi-res free photos.”

Only then we find out how bad some of the “free stock photo” offerings are. Well, maybe not so shocking if you subscribe to the “you get what you pay for ” school of thought. But even taking that into account, some of them are breathtakingly bad. Luckily there are increasingly good places to find high quality, absolutely free stock photos.

All the sites below offer free high-resolution photos under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license which means:

  • you can copy, adapt or distribute the images for either commercial or personal use without requiring creator consent.
  • you can’t claim ownership or resell them as is.

No purchase, permission, or attribution* required. Continue reading “Searching Out Stock Photos” →

In-Person Meetings in the Age of COVID-19

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Video conferencing is great – and I suspect we will be using it more and more even after we get through the current crisis. That said – in the same way that not all jobs can be done remotely, not all meetings can be done that way indefinitely. At some point – probably before a vaccine is available but when R rates are down – physical meetings of some kind will be needed so there will need to be some thought about how to safely hold them.

I’m deliberately using the word meeting to differentiate it from an event or gathering since – at least in my opinion – event and gathering imply a larger scale, less controlled attendance. Events and gatherings will be, we can assume, much further down the road. But meetings – which for the purposes of this piece are invite-based, agenda-driven functions for work or organisational reasons – may well be needed sooner and they cannot be arranged or managed as they used to be.

Everything must now be arranged with an added awareness of COVID-19. This is the fact that underpins everything you, as a meeting or event organiser will do: There is a risk that attendee might – unwittingly – expose others to the COVID-19 virus. Clustered exposure can lead to hot spots and localised spikes – and for meetings where attendees come from any distance, broader spikes.

So, these are some steps you may wish to take: Continue reading “In-Person Meetings in the Age of COVID-19” →