Jason Farradane Award

The Jason Farradane Award is made to an individual or a group of people in recognition of outstanding work in the information profession.

Criteria

The Award is given in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the information profession, by meeting one or more of the following criteria:

• raising the profile of the information profession within an organisation or field of endeavour in a way which can or has become an exemplar to others;
• raising the awareness of the value of information in the workplace;
• demonstrating excellence in education and teaching in information science;
• a major contribution to the theory and practice  of information science or information management.

2007 Award

The 2007 Jason Farradane Award went to Caroline Williams and the Intute community network, a free online service created by university subject specialists, with over 100,000 links to academic content on the Web, as well as a suite of virtual training tutorials and Internet information services.

The nomination describes Intute as "a great example of the UK library community taking a long-term pioneering role in the Internet information environment, developing a national service through collaboration, which has grown to become well respected and highly used worldwide." Intute has demonstrated extraordinary longevity in Internet terms.

Its origins lie in the 1996 Electronic Libraries Programme (a former winner of the Jason Farradane award). Later, the individual subject services were federated into the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). However, it wasn't until 2003, when MIMAS at Manchester University Computing took on the service and appointed Caroline Williams as Executive Director, that it begun to mature into a single organisation with a unified culture, interface, technological platform and identity. One of the great achievements of Caroline Williams as executive director has been to create organisational strategies and systems that enable distributed teams to run a unified and coherent service.

The awards committee felt that this nomination strongly upholds the spirit of the Jason Farradane award in developing a product or service that has made a significant impact on the availability and accessibility of information. Intute's model of shared services has made the UK a world leader in delivering Internet services for education and research on a national level.

About Jason Farradane

Jason Farradane graduated in chemistry in 1929 at what is now Imperial College and started work in industry as a chemist and documentalist. After working in research at the Ministry of Supply and the Admiralty during World War II, he first made an impact with a paper on the scientific approach to documentation at a Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in 1948.

He was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958 and the first academic courses in information science in 1963 at the precursor of City University, where he became Director of the Centre for Information Science in 1966. Of Central European origin, his commitment to science was reflected in the name he created for himself - a combination of Faraday and Haldane, two scientists he particularly admired. On the research side his main contributions lay in relational analysis, which can now perhaps be seen as providing a precursor to work in the area of A.I., and the concept of information. He saw information science as a step towards understanding and better organizing ourselves.

All enquiries to awards@ukeig.org.uk