Mats Lindquist wins UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award 2007

Unfortunately there is no photo available yet, but UKeiG will be posting the official award photographs as soon as they are available.

The 2007 Tony Kent Strix Award, sponsored by Sage Publications was awarded to Mats Lindquist, who travelled from the National Library of Sweden with two colleagues to accept the trophy. Mats G. Lindquist is senior executive officer at the National Library of Sweden, department for National cooperation. He was previously director of the Economics library at Göteborg University and director of the main library for science, technology, and medicine (UB2) at Lund University. He has taught and been on the faculty at the schools of library and information science in Turku, Finland and Borås, Sweden. He is a "docent" (Associate Professor) in information management at Åbo Akademi University in Turku. From 1979-92 he was managing director and marketing manager for the software company Paralog, specializing in information retrieval and text-database management. He started in the field of Library and Information Science in 1970 as a research scholar at the Royal Institute of Technology Library, Stockholm.

Professor Lindquist received the 2007 Tony Kent Strix Award on the basis of both his key role in the development of, or significant improvement in, accessibility to an information service, and for his sustained contribution to the field of information retrieval generally over a number of years. The first aspect relates to his role in the business development of Paralog AB and its TRIP retrieval system, and the second to his many and varied subsequent roles in a variety of organisations.

Between 1980 and 1992 Professor Lindquist alternated as President and Marketing Director of Paralog AB, a software company which developed and marketed text retrieval software; the TRIP system is still in very much in use. During that time he was mainly responsible for moving the system from an experimental service to a fully fledged commercial operation. This parallels the work of Tony Kent in moving the UK Chemical Information Service from an experimental basis at Nottingham University to a fully operational service. It is no coincidence that Prof. Lindquist spent some months working with Tony Kent at Nottingham. Professor Lindquist’s contribution to the development and exploitation of TRIP demonstrates an initiative and entrepreneurial flair very much in the spirit of Tony Kent himself, and makes him an eminently worthy recipient of the Strix award.

Professor Lindquist’s subsequent contributions to information science are too many and varied to list individually. The most significant points which arise are:

1. His commitment to moving information retrieval from a ‘technical’ solution for specialists to a more usable tool for a wider range of information managers and users, in both commercial and governmental settings as well as academia. Today we might say more ‘user-friendly’.
2. His idea - not unique, but rather unusual during the early days – that a good software developer needed not only technical people with outstanding skills, but also people who related well to that vital person, the customer. It is now a cliché to talk about ‘a customer orientation’, but he was one of the first to put the customer at the top of the list of priorities, and this was not just paying lip-service to a slogan. For example, he urged the creation of the Paralog User Group, supported its activities, and involved all his staff, not just the marketing people.

The Awards Committee felt that the nomination, with its close links to Tony Kent, was particularly strong – it is for an outstanding contribution to information retrieval - practically focused and grounded in the best principles of information science.