Welcome to our autumn 2012 edition of Informer! This is the time of the year when we are all looking forward to THE annual highlight, the AGM of the BCS IRSG. And here comes our first request: do come along if you want to have an impact on the group’s activities. Join the committee and help shape the future of the IRSG. And while you are in London, why not attend Search Solutions as well? This is our annual autumn event where we invite a number of high-profile speakers representing a range of interests and “stakeholders”, what they have in common is that they all work on search-related issues.
What else? SIGIR 2012 was great. My personal highlight was David Hawking chairing the Industry Track panel session, actually two panels, one that got actively engaged in the discussion and the other one represented by empty chairs because the panelists that David introduced had all been dead for years.
Now over to this edition of Informer. What have we prepared for you? First of all, we will continue Tony’s popular series of articles on faceted search, this time he asks Where am I? Techniques for wayfinding and navigation in faceted search. Tyler is going a step further when he predicts in The Future of Information that we are moving a away from search altogether to a seamless navigation of information.
We have two book reviews for you this time: MultiLingual Information Retrieval – From Research to Practice (Carol Peters, Martin Braschler and Paul Clough) reviewed by Jolanta Mizera-Pietraszko and another one, Doing Design Ethnography (Andrew Crabtree, Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie) reviewed by Paul Matthews. We also include a specific call for book reviews. In fact, if you are interested in writing your own review on a Springer book that is hot off the press, then do let us know and our book editor Cathal will be arranging a deal whereas you get the book and we get the review.
We also have a few conference reviews. Michael Oakes went off to Greece for a week, not to dive but to teach and he has compiled a comprehensive review of the MUMIA Summer School which focussed on Building Next Generation Search Systems. Also, for those of you who missed SIGIR this year, Ronan Cummins and Pablo Castells joined forces to present a highly selective review of what happened.
Andy has compiled a list of upcoming search events, and please let us know if you are organising a conference or workshop and would like to see your event included in the next edition of Informer.
If you have any suggestions for topics we should cover, then please let us know.
Enjoy the summer, sorry, autumn!