Tony Kent Strix Award Winner

UKeiG is pleased to announce the winner of its Tony Kent Strix Award.

This year's award was presented to Stella Dextre Clarke by Gary Horrocks and a representative of Sage Publishing, the sponsors of UKeiG awards, at the Online Information Meeting in London today (29th November).
The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented in memory of Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. The Award was presented to Stella Dextre Clarke in recognition of her sterling work in developing first the Government Category List, and then its successor the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV). IPSV is now one of the mandated elements of the UK Government's interoperability framework and is used throughout local government and the more enlightened parts of central government.
Whilst its design is grounded in solid information science theory, IPSV is a very practical tool which aims to promote and facilitate better information retrieval by the citizens of the UK from public sector sources. Through the promotion of IPSV we have seen the awareness and application of classification schemes in general increase in all fields across the public sector - extending beyond the specific subject focus of IPSV into parallel classification schemes for audiences, services and functions.
Stella's extensive expertise in the area of vocabulary is also widely recognised outside government circles. She has played a pivotal role in revising and updating BS5723 (Structured vocabularies for information retrieval) chairing the working party and building international support for the conclusions. Stella's nomination upholds the spirit of the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award - an outstanding contribution to information retrieval, practically focussed but grounded in the best principles of information science.
Watch this space for photos of the presentation!

Karen's Honorary FCLIP Presentation

Karen Blakeman was presented with her Honorary Fellowship of CILIP yesterday by Chief Executive, Bob McKee.








The presentation took place on Tuesday 28th November on the CILIP Stand (306) at Online Information 2006.

Jason Farradane Award Winner

UKeiG is pleased to announce the winner of the 2006 Jason Farradane Award.
This year's award was made to the University of Warwick for the development of The Learning Grid, a revolutionary information and learning service. The blended service is a unique combination of a radical new library design, coupled with ground-breaking operating practices, all supported by advanced information literacy training and learning support programmes for students.
The result is best described as "total information immersion" - an attractive environment where students can immerse themselves in the best information resources and services available whilst working collaboratively with each other on shared problems. Usage is very high - and growing - and it is considered a major attractor for the University. Its positive impact on the availability, accessibility of information is easily demonstrated and the new service model and spatial designs have become an exemplar to others, both nationally and internationally.
The awards committee felt that this nomination strongly upholds the spirit of the Jason Farradane award - a strong desire to promote good information practice to the widest audience through the use of innovative techniques and approaches.
Watch this space for photos of the Award presentation at the Online Information Meeting, when the award was presented by Gary Horrocks and a representative of the Award sponsors, Sage Publishing.

Karen Blakeman's Hon FCLIP Presentation

Posted on behalf of Madeleine Tseyoungsun, Branch & Group Co-ordinator, CILIP

Dear UKeiG member,

Karen Blakeman - who was unable to attend the ceremony held at Members' Day - is to be presented with her Honorary Award during Online at Olympia, next Tuesday 28 November. Arrangements are being made for the official presentation and a modest celebration to be held at the CILIP stand [stand number 306] between 13.30 and 14.00. As a member of UKeiG you would be particularly welcome to come along and join in the occasion. Please let Vivien Scorer (vivien.scorer@cilip.org.uk) know if you wish to come but would not otherwise be at Online.

Many thanks.

Madeleine Tseyoungsun
Branch & Group Co-ordinator, CILIP
7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE
Tel: 020 7255 0638
Email: madeleine.tseyoungsun@cilip.org.uk

HereUAre, Gigablast, 10 Billion, and Spam

An interesting item I found in Greg Notess's Search Engine Showdown Blog on what purports to be a new search engine called HereUAre. Looks new but when you do a search it seems to be just a front end to Gigablast. Greg gives the history of his research on the site. My opinion? Don't bother with it - go straight to the original Gigablast

Use of wikis in schools in the UK

I had a query from someone attending the East of England ISG event in Cambridge yesterday (Let's Get Wiki'd). They wanted to know if there are any examples or case studies of wikis being used to teach children in the UK. (Please note UK!).

A quick search found the following two documents:

Futurelab - Research - Discussion Papers: Using wikis in schools
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/discuss/05discuss01.htm

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Evaluate | The writing's on the wall for paper and pencil
http://education.guardian.co.uk/evaluate/story/0,,1775347,00.html

Does anyone know of any other examples?

Thanks

Karen Blakeman email: karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk

Web exceeds 100 million 'web sites'

Just when you thought you had got on top of information overload, Netcraft releases their latest survey revealing that there are now more than 100 million domain/host names out there. This is an increase of 3.5 million over last month, and the accompanying graph suggests that there is no slow down in peeps wanting to set up their own domain on the Net. The report is confusing because the text refers to web sites but the graph is labelled Domains August 1995 - November 2006 and the relevant line is labelled host names. Domain names and web sites are NOT synonymous. A single web site can be set up so that several domain names point to it - until recently the UKeiG web site had 9 domain names. Also many domain names are bought but not used for an active web site.

A little more reassuring and manageable is the line on the graph that shows active domains, which is getting close to 51 million. Compare that with Netcraft's first survey in August 1995 which identified 18,957 hosts.

Too much information - my brain is beginning to hurt !

UKeiG Browser Share - October 2006

Time for the monthly review of what people are using to access to the UKeiG web site and blog. I must admit that this month I had to check the figures several times to make sure I was not imagining them. I even ran the stats through three other analysis programs, but the figures still came out roughly the same. The figures are based on 34,294 page views in October 2006.

IE 6 is still in the lead with 58%. Firefox 1.x comes in at number 2 with 24% and Firefox 2.x already has a share of 7%. So that makes Firefox's share a whopping 31%. Perhaps I should not be too surprised; after all, UKeiG actively promotes the Firefox via its factsheets, on the wiki and in many of its workshops and seminars.

UkeiG Intranets Forum: 7th December: London: working with sub-editors

Working with sub-editors is the theme of the meeting, looking at issues around:

• obtaining buy-in
• supporting and training
• managing content and style

Come and hear other people's experiences and share yours. Susan Henry, Information Officer from the Society of Radiographers and Tara Craig, Group Brand and Communications Executive from The Economist Group will start the meeting, followed by an open discussion.

Further details are on the UKeiG website in the members' area.
Information about joining is at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/join/index.html

Election of Members to the UKeiG Management Committee

Nominations are invited for election to the UKeiG Management Committee.

Nominations must be signed by the candidate, a proposer and a seconder, all of whom must be members* or associated members* of UKeiG. Nominees, proposers and seconders do not have to be members of CILIP except in the case of Honorary Officers (Chair, Vice-chair, Honorary Secretary, Honorary Treasurer). Each nomination should include a 50 word summary of the candidate’s relevant experience. This summary will be circulated to the membership in the event of a ballot being held.

*The term 'member' refers to members of CILIP who are members of UKeiG. 'Associated member' refers to members of UKeiG who are not members of CILIP.

Nomination forms will go out with next UKeiG mailing but can also be obtained from Christine Baker, Honorary Secretary UKeiG, The Old Chapel, Walden, West Burton, LEYBURN North Yorkshire, DL8 4LE, Tel & Fax: 01969 663749, email: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk or from the ukeig website at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/about/nominations.html

Nominations must be sent via post or fax to Christine Baker, UKeiG Honorary Secretary by Friday, 1st December 2006