Connie Crosby and the Quiet Art of Making Knowledge Findable

The Bridge Between Bikes and Books

On a summer afternoon in 2016, Connie Crosby pedaled through southern Ontario as part of a Cycling for Libraries bike tour a gathering that brought together librarians, book enthusiasts, and what she describes as "an avid international group" of participants. It was during that ride that she met Janet Joy Wilson, a Toronto-based community builder who had co-founded The Reading Line, a grassroots organization that organizes seasonal bike rides through the city, stopping at public spaces where speakers and authors read aloud. The event is free for participants and designed to celebrate independent booksellers.

Crosby, who is based in Toronto and works in knowledge management and information architecture, found in Wilson's project something that resonated with her own decades-long thinking about how people discover and navigate knowledge. "People ask how it is I do so many interesting things, and my answer is always the same: 'That's nothing. You should see what my friends are doing,'" Crosby wrote on her personal site. "When you surround yourself with inspiring people, it is difficult not to be inspired yourself."

The connection between books and bikes might seem incidental a pleasant community event in a major city. But for someone who has spent a career thinking about indexing, taxonomy, and the structures that help readers find what they need, The Reading Line represents something larger: a belief that access to knowledge is not just a technical problem but a human one, solved through imagination, physical presence, and creative community-building.

"How does she do it? She actively uses her imagination, fuelled by constant reading and talking with people from diverse backgrounds. She doesn't just stick with her area of expertise, but branches out into all sorts of areas. This is how we start to see connections between disparate things-like books and bikes!-and start to build new initiatives and knowledge where they did not previously exist."
Connie Crosby, describing Janet Joy Wilson and The Reading Line

What an Indexer Actually Does

The word "indexing" can summon narrow images: a back-of-the-book list of page numbers, perhaps compiled by a publisher as an afterthought. But the practice has a long, serious history as a discipline in its own right and an international journal has been documenting that history since 1958.

The Indexer, the International Journal of Indexing, was first published by the Society of Indexers in the United Kingdom as a twice-yearly journal. In 2008, it moved to a quarterly publication schedule, reflecting a growing body of research and professional exchange. Since 2019, the journal has been published by Liverpool University Press. Its Print ISSN is 0019-4131; its Online ISSN is 1756-0632.

The journal's stated mission is broad: it "seeks to cover the full range of subjects, from articles at the cutting edge of new techniques to contributions discussing in a practical way the new tools available to indexers at all points in the technical spectrum or exploring the history of indexing." A reviews section covers printed and electronic material, including websites and hardware relevant to indexers. Regular conference reports keep readers current with international developments in the indexing community.

The Archive as Evidence

A walk through The Indexer's contents by category reveals the breadth of work the field has tackled over decades. Articles range from "Indexing the Domesday Project" (Volume 15, 1987) and "Indexing and cataloguing the Walt Disney Archives" (also Volume 15) to "Digital journal indexing: electrified or electrocuted?" (Volume 28), which examined practical challenges in an increasingly digital publishing environment.

There are pieces on indexing organizations, on database indexing's evolution, on capturing moving images online, and on the specific challenges of indexing archival collections. The range reflects a profession in constant conversation with new media, new formats, and new questions about what it means to help a reader find something.

This is not obscure, technical history. It is the documented evolution of the systems that allow any reader in any era to move through knowledge with some sense of orientation. And it is a conversation that predates the internet, predates search engines, and predates large language models by many decades.

Connie Crosby's Work in Knowledge and Innovation

On her personal site, Crosby describes her practice with a phrase that echoes across her work: "New Adventures in Knowledge and Innovation." Her background sits at the intersection of knowledge management, information architecture, and community engagement a combination that sounds abstract until you see it in action.

The Reading Line, which she highlights as an example of imaginative community-building, is illustrative. The event is simple in concept: cyclists ride between public spaces in Toronto, stopping to hear authors read. It is free, grassroots, and designed to support independent booksellers. A video from the 2018 ride, narrated by Wilson herself, captures the energy of the event. "What a great way to get people together exploring our city and its storytellers, while also promoting independent booksellers in the city," Crosby wrote. "And this books-and-bikes event is free for participants!"

Crosby's own blog posts reveal a practitioner who thinks carefully about knowledge structures in everyday contexts. A January 2019 post titled "The hidden benefits of blogging" describes how writing online creates a space to work out thoughts and opinions a form of externalized knowledge management that any reader can follow. "From the outside, it may just look like someone sharing their ideas or promoting themselves," she noted, "however, from the inside, there is a whole lot more going on with a blog."

This attention to the hidden structures of knowledge work how people find things, how ideas connect, how communities form around shared discovery runs through everything Crosby touches. It is, in its own way, indexing made human-scale.

The Age of AI Search and What It Asks of Indexers

As of June 2026, AI-powered search tools have reshaped how readers locate information online. Large language models generate summaries, synthesize across sources, and answer questions in plain language. The default assumption in many quarters is that the traditional index a curated, human-generated finding aid has become redundant. Why consult a subject index when a chatbot can answer any query directly?

But this framing overlooks something the indexing community has long understood: the question of how something is found shapes what is found, and who finds it. A good index is not just a list of keywords. It is a record of human judgment about relevance, about what matters, about the connections a knowledgeable reader might want to follow. It encodes authority and awareness in ways that keyword search, however sophisticated, cannot fully replicate.

The Indexer has published articles across decades that grapple with technology's impact on discovery from early database indexing challenges to the complexities of digital journals. The journal's coverage reflects a profession that has survived previous technological upheavals by adapting its core principles to new tools.

What Connie Crosby's work suggests is that the same adaptive logic applies at the community level. The Reading Line is not a digital tool. It does not use AI. But it solves a discovery problem how do readers encounter books and authors they did not already know? through physical presence, curation, and human judgment. It is a grassroots index, in a sense: a curated path through the landscape of reading, designed by people who know that discovery is not just about access but about the quality of the encounter.

What This Means for ReadersOpinions Readers

If you come to ReadersOpinions for stories about books, authors, and the cultures that surround them, the Crosby-and-indexing angle offers something practical: a framework for thinking about how readers find the books they need. Indexing is not a peripheral concern. It is the infrastructure of discovery. And the history documented in The Indexer shows that this infrastructure has always been shaped by human judgment, evolving technology, and changing ideas about what readers deserve.

For those building or promoting books, understanding indexing its history, its ethics, its possibilities means understanding what it takes to be found. For readers, it means understanding that the path to a new author or idea is rarely neutral. Someone designed that path. Someone made choices about what to name, what to connect, what to surface. The question is whether those choices were made thoughtfully.

The Common Thread: Imagination and Structure

Crosby used a specific word when describing The Reading Line and its founder: imagination. "This is how we start to see connections between disparate things-like books and bikes!-and start to build new initiatives and knowledge where they did not previously exist," she wrote. "It is this imagination that helps drive innovation."

The indexing community, as documented in The Indexer's archive, operates with a related but distinct impulse: the drive to impose structure on complexity, to create reliable paths through dense information. These impulses imaginative connection and disciplined structure might seem opposed. But Crosby's own practice suggests they are not.

On her personal site, she writes about the benefits of blogging as a thinking tool, about the pleasure of connecting with inspiring people, about the value of stepping outside one's area of expertise. These are not the habits of a narrow technocrat. They are the habits of someone who understands that good knowledge work requires both rigor and imagination and that the best finding aids, like the best reading communities, are built by people who love books enough to ask how others might come to love them too.

Where to Read Further

Readers who want to explore the themes in this article directly are encouraged to visit Connie Crosby's personal site, where she writes about knowledge management, innovation, and community. The video from the 2018 Reading Line ride is available through her site and offers a vivid sense of how the books-and-bikes concept works in practice.

For the formal side of the story, The Indexer's home page provides access to the journal's full range of current and archived content. The contents by category page offers a browsable history of indexing scholarship, from archive cataloguing challenges to digital journal debates, that spans more than six decades of professional reflection.

Both sources are independent of each other Crosby is not an editor or contributor to The Indexer but they share a conviction: that helping people find knowledge is a craft worth thinking carefully about. In an era when search feels effortless, that conviction may be more valuable than it appears.

A Timeline: Key Milestones in the Story