ECIR 2022 10-14 April – the latest news

The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’22) will be held in Stavanger, Norway, between April 10 and 14, 2022. It will be the northern-most location in the history of ECIR, with the Norwegian fjord region offering some of the most majestic and spectacular scenery in the world. With its intimate and mostly pedestrian centre,… Continue reading ECIR 2022 10-14 April – the latest news

Exploring Information Retrieval – A series of eight ISKO UK / BCS IRSG IR workshops

Following requests from attendees to the ISKO UK KO-ED classes (part of the programme Knowledge Organization Education) ISKO UK ran two workshops in the Autumn: the first one on vocabulary control with Sylvie Davis and the second one on the UDC with Aida Slavic. The last of the three workshops “Practical Thesaurus Construction” with Stella… Continue reading Exploring Information Retrieval – A series of eight ISKO UK / BCS IRSG IR workshops

At last – an academic deep dive into an enterprise search case study

The opening presentation at Search Solutions 2021 in November given by Professor Katriina Byström (Oslo Metropolitan University) in which she summarised the outcomes of  research she had carried out with Professor Marianne Lykke, Ann Bygholm and Louise Bak Søndergaard ( Department of Communications and Psychology at Aalborg University) on enterprise search use across an organisation.… Continue reading At last – an academic deep dive into an enterprise search case study

Brief Overview of the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Some Challenges for Text Extraction

(Note from the Editor  PDF files are so ubiquitous in business and in academia that few people give any thought to the problems that arise in extracting text from a PDF to incorporate into a search index. Tim Allison is a consultant working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has been at the forefront… Continue reading Brief Overview of the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Some Challenges for Text Extraction

Book review – Invisible Search and Online Search Engines

(A note from the Editor. This 161pp book was published in 2019 but recently became open access. I must have missed it first time around!) The reviewer Cass Zhixue Zhao I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. I have obtained my PhD from Information School, University of Sheffield.… Continue reading Book review – Invisible Search and Online Search Engines

ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2022

The annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) is the primary international event for the inter- and multi-disciplinary community of academics and practitioners in digital libraries coming from computer, information and social sciences, and other related disciplines such as information retrieval. JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term digital libraries, including notions of… Continue reading ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2022

And finally….from the Editor

During the closing panel session of the Search Solutions conference in November Professor Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow) highlighted the need to keep graduate and undergraduate courses updated in line with the very rapid developments in IR theory, development and practice. Around this time there was a Twitter thread about what might be the best… Continue reading And finally….from the Editor

In the Autumn 2021 issue

I’ve given a lot of prominence to the forthcoming Search Solutions 2021 event on 23/24 November with Tutorials on the Tuesday  and the Conference on the Wednesday. Apart from one tutorial it will (sadly) be a virtual event. The IRSG AGM will take place at the end of the Conference, and a call for nominations… Continue reading In the Autumn 2021 issue

Call for nominations to the BCS IRSG Committee

The BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group invites nominations for the following positions: – Vice-Chair – Secretary – Inclusion Officer – Six ordinary members of the committee