At the AGM (held during the TALMIRI conference in September) I set out an editorial policy for Informer.
“My overall aim to balance academic and practitioner interests, and to present developments and achievements in as broad a range as possible of search applications. In doing so I hope that Informer will increase the membership and influence of IRSG”
I hope you will feel that this issue reflects this policy statement. Certainly the TALMIRI conference held at the University of Bedfordshire mirrored this policy, with TALMIRI being an acronym for Talent Meets the Information Retrieval Industry. There are two ‘department profiles’. The first of these summarises the scale of the research being undertaken at The Open University, in particular at the Knowledge Media Institute. This year the OU has been celebrating the 50th anniversary of its foundation. The second profile outlines the themes of the research being undertaken within the Information School at the University of Sheffield. Frank Hopfgartner, a Senior Lecturer at the Information School, reviews a history of information retrieval written by Donna Harman. The department profiles will continue to a regular feature in 2020. Among other contributions are a very neat approach to identifying the cause of enterprise search failures and a report on the European Summer School for Information Retrieval . I should also highlight the list of search conferences which is diligently compiled for each issue by Andy MacFarlane at City, University of London. Finally I have made a suggestion about how academic research could reach out to the information retrieval industry.
The copy date for the Winter Edition is 30 January 2020 if you would like to contribute to Informer or have a suggestion for a topic.