NOTICE: The BCS IRSG is seeking new committee members. If you are interested to find out more please see details on the nomination and election process. November 3rd 2022 is the deadline for nominations.
Can I start by highlighting the forthcoming vacancy for an Editor for Informer, to take over at the end of 2022. I might also mention that there will be a number of vacancies on the IRSG Committee for 2023, including the position of Chair as Udo Kruschwitz has served his two year term.
This issue contains two superb reports on the LREC 2022 and SIGIR 2022 conferences contributed by Dennis Aumiller. I’ve also linked to reflections on ECIR 2022 (Stavanger) by Krisztian Balog and his colleagues that was published in the SIGIR Forum newsletter in June. As well has highlighting some of the papers and themes of the conferences there are many insights in all three reports into the challenges of managing hybrid conferences which should be of interest to anyone involved in a conference, no matter what its size and topic. In addition there is a reminder of the Search Solutions 2022 conference on 23/24 November and a list of forthcoming events diligently compiled by Andy Macfarlane. Of course among these events is ECIR 2023 in Dublin in early April.
There are a number of book reviews in this issue covering taxonomy management, the role of digital technologies (including enterprise search) in supporting knowledge management initiatives, the science of reading and a fascinating autobiography from David Hawking.
Two awards are now open for nominations, the Karen Spark Jones Award from IRSG (sponsored by Microsoft Research) and the UKeIG Tony Kent Strix Award. in which IRSG is a partner. The deadlines for both are by coincidence 9 September.
Also in this issue there are calls for papers for forthcoming special issues in 2023 of JASIS&T on the subject of information retrieval research and also of the ACM TIOS journal on efficiencies in neural information retrieval. Open Source Connections has released a collection of video presentations on a very wide range of relevance topics and a very challenging paper from Professor Justin Zobell on the questionable value of batch-mode IR testing has just been published in the July issue of SIGIR Forum and deserves the widest possibly readership.
And finally I consider the role and future of Informer.
The copy date for the Autumn issue is 31 October and for the Winter issue (my last as Editor) it is 8 January 2023.
Martin White