Author: Martin White

The Graduate Student Corner concept was suggested to me last year by Professor Jochen Liedner with the following scope note “IRSG would like to offer doctoral students a forum to present their research in progress beyond the more formal workshop, conference and journal papers.  Many of you have plenty of good ideas, and often the… Continue reading Graduate Student Corner – a new feature for Informer

The Information Retrieval Specialist Group can trace its origins back to 1998, though the British Computer Society itself was founded in 1957. There are over 50 Specialist Groups, and in 2022 a NeurodiverseIT Specialist Group was formed as the result of the independent efforts of Richard Cornell and Matthew Bellringer. The Group is run for… Continue reading NeurodiverseIT Specialist Group

In 2012 I undertook a project for the European Commission which had as its objectives the identification of barriers to the development and use of enterprise search applications in the EU. The primary conclusion was that the lack of training for enterprise search software developers and for enterprise search managers was the major barrier.

How do you review a book that runs to almost 900 pages? Answers on a pack of postcards please! Two books sparked my interest in the history of information. The first was A History of Online Information Services 1963-1976 by Bourne and Hahn which provides a vast amount of detail on the early development of… Continue reading Information – A Historical Companion (Review)

When I started work at Logica in 1989 one of the most talented of my consulting team (let me call him John) had a significant visual handicap resulting from macular degeneration. At the time John had to rely on a horizontally-scrolling LED display of text to write reports and create emails. Apart from being a… Continue reading And finally…..from the Editor