The centrepiece of this issue is a profile of the IR research and teaching activities of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Glasgow. This is the first of what I plan to be a series of profiles of university departments with a strong IR/search focus. Initially these will be UK departments but then I’ll start expanding the profiles to EU departments. That will provide quite enough profiles for the next few years. Next up will be the Information School at the University of Sheffield. If you would like to have a profile published of your own department please let me know. I’m also delighted to be able to publish an account of a web search engine developed in Syria. For a change of format it is presented as a near-verbatim transcript between Jochen Liedner and the founder Shadi Saleh. Fascinating! There is no reason for Informer just to be a record of what has happened; it should also highlight what is happening or is about to come over the horizon. Even so, reports on recent conferences do give a good sense of trends in the IR/search sector, and in this issue we are covering ECIR2019 and ISKOUK 2019. I would also highlight a new one day conference that is being presented by the University of Bedford on 18 September.
Copy date for the Autumn issue is 23 September. The publication date is 5 October.