This is an announcement for the paper "An ordinal index characterizing weak compactness of operators" by Ryan M Causey. Abstract: We introduce an ordinal index which characterizes weak compactness of operators between Banach spaces. We study when classes consisting of operators having bounded index form a closed ideal, the distinctness of the classes, and the descriptive set theoretic properties of this index. Archive classification: math.FA Submitted from: CAUSEYRM@mailbox.sc.edu The paper may be downloaded from the archive by web browser from URL http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/1508.02065 or http://arXiv.org/abs/1508.02065