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 to the Committee is included in this issue. Over the last few months the IRSG web site has been cleansed and migrated into the BCS Group template. We are working on a new template for Informer, but that may not be visible until early 2022. ECIR 2022 is now gathering momentum. It will be held on-site in Stavanger on 10-14 April but there will also be support for virtually-attending delegates.
The two feature articles this month are on the newly-announced IR Anthology, with some 60,000 research papers on information retrieval, and on the impact on IT budgets of moving search from on-premise to cloud platforms. There is a brief note on the publication of a history of the Institute of Information Scientists (1958-2002) and a review of an excellent book by Susan Walsh on classifying and fixing dirty data. And finally an alert to a profile I am writing on the life and achievements of G. Malcolm Dyson (1902-1978) a brilliant British chemist who transformed the fortunes of Chemical Abstracts Service whilst acting as Director of Research from 1959-1962. The issue closes with a comprehensive list of forthcoming conferences.
Much of this issue has been authored by me and that should not be the case. I’d be delighted to have contributions from members of IRSG about (just as examples)
- Research projects you are working on
- Conferences you have participated in
- Departments that you are proud of
- Visions of the future you would like to test out
- People who have inspired you to take IR seriously
- Books you have enjoyed (or perhaps not enjoyed!) reading
- Applications you have developed
- Problems you are facing and would welcome solutions
- Problems you have solved which may have a wider application