Six years after their last residential conference, indexers gathered in Birmingham, in the Heart of England, for ‘The Heart and Mind of Indexing’, the Society of Indexers 2025 conference. With a mixture of plenary sessions and breakout groups, plus plenty of opportunities for informal networking, the three-day event ranged widely, from artificial intelligence to emotional indexing – the heart and mind of the human indexer. In this article, a member of the organising committee considers the advantages of in-person conferences and summarises the programme content.
Ann Kingdom (Sat,) studied this question.