UKeiG Awards: PIONEERS IN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SCOOP TOP AWARDS

UKeiG are delighted to announce today the winners of the Strix and Jason Farradane Awards, which will be presented at the Online Information conference and exhibition at London's Olympia in December. The awards are sponsored by The Journal of Information Science, published by SAGE, the world's largest, independent academic publisher.

Both awards celebrate achievement in the broad field of information management. The 2007 Strix Award, created in honour of Dr Tony Kent, is made to Mats Lindquist, senior executive officer at the National Library of Sweden.

"We're delighted to award the tenth annual Strix Award to Professor Lindquist, "said Adrian Dale, editor of The Journal of Information Science and Online Information conference chairman. "In the world of practical full text information retrieval he is one of the "giants", wholly in the spirit of Tony Kent's contribution in chemical information".

Professor Lindquist won the Strix Award for his key role in the development and significant improvement in accessibility to an information service through the business development of Paralog AB and its TRIP retrieval system. The Award also recognises his sustained contribution over many years to the field of information retrieval.

The Jason Farradane Award, which recognises brilliant work in information science, is made to executive director of Intute, Caroline Williams and the Intute community network. Intute is a free online service, created in partnership with 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.

Adrian Dale praised highly the winners. "Intute is a great example of the UK library community taking a long-term, pioneering role in the Internet information environment. Through effective collaboration, they have developed a national service which now has a global reputation."

Intute's origins lie in the 1996 Electronic Libraries programme, where a number of librarians and researchers won JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funding to develop their ideas for new Internet gateway services. The service has thrived as it has always actively pursued exploring original ways of working online, as a community. Intute has also innovated with new technologies - such as Web 2.0 - but always against balanced judgements about their relative value to education and research.

The Awards will be presented at the Online Conference to be held from 4 - 6 December at London's Olympia: the Jason Farradane Award at 14:00 on Tuesday 4 December and the Tony Kent Strix Award at 09:30 on Thursday 6 December.