ICRIS was formed at the turn of the millennium in 2000. Its international committee includes the associations AFEPI Ireland (Association of Editors, Proofreaders and Indexers of Ireland), ANZSI (Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers), ASAIB (Association of Southern African Indexers and Bibliographers), ASI (American Society for Indexing), CSI (China Society of Indexing), ISC/SCI (Indexing Society of Canada/Société canadienne d’indexation) and SI ([British] Society of Indexers). Affiliated networks are the DNI (Deutsches Netzwerk der Indexer/German Indexing Network) and the NIN (Nederlands Indexers Netwerk/Netherlands Indexers Network).

During the 2018 ICRIS meeting in Shanghai (see The Indexer, March 2019), the Dutch and German indexing networks offered to explore whether the next meeting in 2021 could be held jointly with an indexing conference in Germany or the Netherlands. In the end, Germany was chosen as the venue. However, the conference will be jointly organised by the Dutch and German indexing networks (NIN and DNI) and the UK Society of Indexers (SI). Moreover, the German Association for Information and Knowledge (DGI) is supporting the conference. DGI has agreed to host the conference website and provide booking administration. We are very grateful to Ms Marlies Ockenfeld and Ms Margarita Reibel-Felten for this.

The organisation is in the hands of Walter Greulich, Jutta Mühlenberg and Katharina Munk (DNI); Ann Kingdom (SI); Caroline Diepeveen and Pierke Bosschieter (NIN and joint coordinators of ICRIS). Berlin is an internationally attractive destination. To accommodate those who want to combine the conference with a visit to one of the biggest events of the publishing year – the Frankfurt Book Fair – we have chosen a date in October. The venue in Berlin is the WeiberWirtschaft, which has been helping women start their own businesses for more than 20 years. This seems a particularly appropriate venue for a profession dominated by women. Lunches will be taken at nearby restaurants; recommendations for dinner and hotel accommodation will be communicated at the beginning of the booking process. The event will be a hybrid event where presentations will be livestreamed from the WeiberWirtschaft in Berlin to online participants, and the presentations of speakers who cannot come to Berlin will be projected on a screen in the event space via Zoom. Online participants will have the opportunity to network in Zoom breakout rooms, while on-site participants can network during dinner. Our three keynote speakers approach organising information from different angles, giving the conference a truly international flavour. Judith Flanders (United Kingdom and Canada) looks back at the evolution of alphabetical order, Professor Kiene Brillenburg-Wurth (Netherlands) looks at the future of the alphabet and its implications for indexing, while Professor Urs Stäheli (Germany) takes a sociological approach to registers and list building. The programme also includes contributions from register makers from around the world on a wide range of topics, from customer relations to e-books and other digital developments, and a panel of publishers. Up-to-date information on the programme and registration will be published on the conference website (https://dgi-info.de/continental-connections-international-indexing-conference/). Registration starts at Easter. The conference organisers can be reached at: icris-redaktion@d-indexer.org