There has always been close cooperation between the IRSG and the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organisations (ISKO UK), including a common interest in findability issues, including support our Search Solutions conference. Over the course of the pandemic ISKO UK made a significant contribution to maintaining its programme of meetings and workshop and last year I was invited to give a virtual presentation on the subject of information foraging.
Towards the end of last year I was approached by Aida Slavic, Vice Chair of ISKO UK to explore whether IRSG would be interested in developing a series of lectures on information retrieval pitched at a relatively low-technology level for ISKO UK members in a wide range of knowledge organisation roles in the public, academic and corporate sectors.
We quickly agreed that IRSG would focus on the underlying principles and ISKO UK would select speakers with a KO practitioner perspective and focus on metadata-based IR. The programme came together very quickly, with five speakers invited by IRSG and four speakers invited by ISKO UK under the overall title of Exploring Information Retrieval.
The complete list of speakers and topics can be found at https://www.iskouk.org/page-18260
The virtually-delivered lectures started towards the end of February and were run on the Zoom platform on Thursdays from 18.30 to 19.30. In total there were 493 registrations, though only 366 of these actually logged on. ISKO UK and BCS members did not have to pay the £10 per lecture fee, introduced to try to reduce the number of drop-outs that seem to be very common with on-line tutorials. Overall 78 ISKO UK and 14 BCS members registered and interestingly 83 registrants were willing to pay the lecture fee. The average number of attendees for each lecture was 41. It has been an intensive nine-week course and as it turned out many decided take advantage of the availability of the presentation slides and recordings afterwards. All the lectures generated quite a lively Q&A session.
We were fortunate to get on board an excellent line up of speakers who generously dedicated their time and expertise to support this programme of lectures, using their experience to deliver presentations that were customised to the objective of the programme and to the requirements of the attendees.
I invited Kevin Franklin, an Associate Director at Arup with a responsibility for search support, to give a participant view of the lectures.
Through February and March 2022 ISKO UK and Information Retrieval Specialist Group – British Computer Society (IRSG BCS) hosted ‘Exploring Information Retrieval’ – a series of nine lectures providing, in their words, both an introduction to Information Retrieval and an up- to-date overview of its fundamental concepts, techniques and applications. These online events were free to members of either society or available to non members for £10 per lecture. Thus while the nine week series, curated by Martin White & Aida Slavic, worked as a coherent set it was possible for the viewer to design their own learning path and opt for specific events to suit.
Not to list the individual topics in detail but the story arc of the series took the viewer from the foundations of information retrieval theory (Boolean, ranking and current developments) and built on it with perspectives on the application of artificial intelligence, evaluating search performance, and the many applications of metadata. This was sprinkled with academic theory and findings regarding information seeking behaviour; as well as a very thorough tour of Google’s family of databases – a topic I thought I knew until I saw the level of detail presented.
Overall, excellent. Martin and Aida succeeded in designing an accessible, broad, unified collection of relevant (no pun) topics and presenters. Their Rolodex of university lecturers, textbook authors and researchers is impressive.