I’m looking forward with interest to three virtual search events in November. The Search Solutions 2020 Tutorial Day take place on 24 November followed by the Search Solutions conference itself on 25 November. Then on the afternoon of 26 November comes the Strix Annual Lecture. The decision has now been taken to run ECIR 2021 as a virtual event, and the submission dates have now been revised. We all hope of course that by April next year on-site conferences will start to be scheduled but right now that is a risk that the ECIR 2021 team felt unable to take. In September CLEF2020 was also run virtually and I am delighted to be able to publish some short reports on the event from student attendees. I plan to make this a regular feature for conferences, especially ECIR.
Coping with change is now something that we are all becoming very accustomed to. The feature article in this issue is from Dr David Maxwell who has moved from being a PhD student in Glasgow to being a postdoc researcher in Delft.
In this issue we have one book review. Dr Frank Hopfgartner, Book Reviews Editor, considers an open-access book on the legacy of the research impact of NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research). This is probably a good time to remind publishers and authors that Informer has a very wide readership among the information science, information retrieval and data science communities. If you have a book that you would like to have considered for review than please contact Dr Frank Hopfgartner.
Finally there are some reflections from me on working with Dr. Tony Kent, in whose memory and honour the Strix Award Lecture is held. What you will not find in this issue is Part 2 of a report on the New Future of Work conference that Microsoft Research organised in August. In Part 1, published in the Summer edition, I commented on the management of the conference. Looking at the papers even just a few months after presentation I decided that events and research had both moved on so much that a synopsis of the papers would not be a good use of HTML code.
The copy date for the Winter edition of Informer is 4 January 2021. Submissions are always welcome.