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.

Tricks and tips for better web search

Karen Blakeman's Online 2007 presentation “Tricks and tips for better web search” is now available as a PowerPoint and on Slideshare.

Intute wins the Jason Farradane Award 2007

The 2007 Jason Farradane Award, sponsored by Sage Publications went to Caroline Williams and the Intute community network. Intute is 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.

Next week is Online Week!

Next week is Online Week and the UKeIG Management Committee are dashing around getting everything ready for the stand and their presentations. UKeIG is on stand 734 so drop by and say hello.

A few points to bear in mind:

Pre-register for the exhibition and you will avoid the £15 entrance fee. As well as the exhibition, your badge will give you access to the free seminars and master classes. Details of what is on offer can be found at http://www.online-information.co.uk/online07/seminars_2007.html

The Information Management Solutions exhibition is also running alongside the show. Full details of this related event can be found at http://www.ims-show.co.uk

Remember that there is also a conference running at Olympia entitled Applying Web 2.0: Innovation, Impact & Implementation & featuring a keynote presentation from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. There are only 14 more places left and registration will close at midday Thursday 29th November. Please register without delay if you want to attend at http://www.online-information.co.uk/online07/conferenceprogramme.html

For those of you who are on Facebook, Online Information has a Facebook group with 350+ members. Delegates are already discussing tips for visiting the show; the best restaurants in the area around Olympia; cocktail parties planned etc