The BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group invites nominations for the following positions: – Vice-Chair – Secretary – Inclusion Officer – Six ordinary members of the committee
IRSG web site revisions
The new BCS IRSG web site has been up and running for a couple of months now. The web team at the BCS HQ were a pleasure to work with, and I’d like to thank Simon Curd and Fiona James For their patience and expertise converting my suggestions into the BCS Group template. There are… Continue reading IRSG web site revisions
ECIR 2022 Stavanger 10-14 April 2022
The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval will take place on site in Stavanger, Norway. Sessions will also be streamed for delegates who are not able to travel to Norway. There has been a very good response to the invitations to all the sections of this conference. The conference team has set up an… Continue reading ECIR 2022 Stavanger 10-14 April 2022
IR and ACL Anthologies
The US equivalent of IRSG is SIGIR, which publishes its Forum newsletter every six months. This is always a very good read and you do not have to be a member of SIGIR to do so. One of the feature articles in the June issue (which only came online in October!) is an introduction to… Continue reading IR and ACL Anthologies
Big Information and big budgets
The concept of Big Data has been around for some time. John Mashey at Silicon Graphics is usually credited with inventing the term in a presentation he gave in 1998. Without doubt big data is very difficult to manage and the demand for people with data science skills never seems to slow down. However much… Continue reading Big Information and big budgets
History of the Institute of Information Scientists 1958-2002
Over the last two years I have been working with Dr. Sandra Ward and Professor Charles Oppenheim in writing a history of the Institute of Information Scientists. The IIS was founded in 1958, largely due to the vision and commitment of Jason Farradane and the support of G. Malcolm Dyson. The IIS merged/was taken over… Continue reading History of the Institute of Information Scientists 1958-2002
Book Review 'Between the spreadsheets' Susan Walsh
The full title of this book is Between the Spreadsheets – Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data. What a superb title! It makes you smile before you even open the book. At last there is a book that focuses on content quality and does so in a very practical way. Susan Walsh (aka The Classification Guru)… Continue reading Book Review 'Between the spreadsheets' Susan Walsh
Events Autumn 2021
Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.
And finally….
I suspect that the name G. Malcolm Dyson in the History of the IIS item above will be unfamiliar to anyone who has not been in chemical information retrieval for quite a number of decades. Dyson developed a linear notation for organic chemical compounds in 1946, initially with a view to supporting the use of… Continue reading And finally….
In the Summer 2021 issue
I have often wondered if Editors of newspapers ever worry about whether there will be enough news to fill the next edition. I have a basic structure for Informer issues that runs several issues ahead because it is largely shaped by conference announcements and then reports of those conferences. Those items alone would make for… Continue reading In the Summer 2021 issue