Let me start with IRSG business. Udo has written his last post as Chair as a new Chair will take over after the AGM on 23 November. There have been no candidates to take on the Editorship of Informer so next year we are planning to publish just two issues (in April and November) in what we hope will be an interim situation just for the coming year.
The AGM will take place at the end of the Search Solutions Conference, and you will find the programmes for both the Conference and for the Tutorials on 22 November. Details are also on the IRSG web site.
The two feature articles in this issue report on some aspects of the research underway in the DoSSIER project and give an insight into enterprise search developments from a vendor perspective.
I suspect that few readers will be familiar with the work of Carlos Cuadra, who died in August. I knew him quite well and have written a short obituary and listed some of his major achievements in the development of commercial information retrieval services.
Moving on to books, you will find a review of a book published in 2006 that still remains one of the best introductions to the technology and business impact of enterprise search. I thought it had vanished but came across it recently as an open access download. Also on open access is my attempt to write a history of enterprise search from 1938 (that is not a misprint!) to 2022. There are of course many books on various aspects of search from both a practitioner and research perspective and I have listed out what I hope is a representative selection of books published since 2010.
Andy Macfarlane provides his usual list of IR-related conferences around the world, many of which you can probably observe from the comfort of your home office.
And finally some thoughts from me about what I regard as a rather substantial gap in IR research, probably because (at least in my opinion) search is a poorly understood wicked problem.
Martin White