a triumph for team indexing:2011 wheatley medal

摘要

At the Society of Indexers annual conference at Keele University, the Society's President, Professor JohnSutherland, presented the Wheatley Medal for 2011 to a team of indexers from the Netherlands, CarolineDiepeveen, Pierke Bosschieter and Jacqueline Pitchford-Belder, for their work on the index to heEncyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic Word (edited by N. Stillman and published by Brill in 2010). According tothe chair of the judging panel, Professor Cathy Shrank of Sheffield University, this was an exceptional indexand a most deserving winner. The size of the task (indexing a five-volume work) was immense in itself, andindexing an encyclopaedia (which is itself a kind of index) requires something different from indexing otherworks. In this case, this difficult task was accomplished with scholarly authority. The judges also noted theexcellent use of reader-friendly devices, the consistent practice of translating foreign language terms to makethe text accessible to a less specialist audience, the attractive lay-out, which was also easy on the eye, and theadroit use of double-postings. They singled out the scrupulous editing for particular praise.“None of us foundany clues to the fact that this index was compiled by a team. The overall editing [by Caroline Diepeveen] tocombine three people's work must have been very thoroughly done. This is no mean feat in an index of thissize. In short, the panel was deeply impressed.