About Sergey Lobachev

Winner, 2017 Purple Pen Award

Sergey Lobachev has won ICI's 2017 Purple Pen Competition. His index will appear in the book The Magnificent Nahanni: The Struggle to Protect a Wild Place by Gordon and Shirley Nelson (published by the University of Regina Press).

The judges praised his index for its strong treatment of the book's main topics, which would especially aid a re-reader trying to find material. Moreover, he provided useful conceptual analysis for entries like "wilderness" that a word search would not catch; it takes intellectual analysis of the text to recognize these, and the index showed he had put real thought into compiling and structuring these entries.

Sergey said that this was his first project for the University of Regina Press whom he had solicited for work by sending a letter to the press. He found the book a challenge to index as it involved distinguishing among the many closely related concepts, including "Nahanni ecosystem," "Nahanni National Park Reserve," "Nahanni people," "Nahanni River," and "Nahanni Valley."

He also had to carefully input the diacritics which he did accurately, showing his attention to detail.

Sergey completed the University of California, Berkeley, course "Indexing: Theory and Application" in 2013, and shortly after had launched his indexing business.

A board member of the Indexing Society of Canada/Société canadienne d'indexation, he lives in London, Ontario. Prior to becoming an indexer, he worked in academic and public libraries, and holds a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Western Ontario. He also retains a membership in the American Society for Indexing (ASI).