2009 Tony Kent Strix Award winner

The 2009 Tony Kent Strix Award winner is Carol Ann Peters

The Tony Kent Strix Award, given by the UK eInformation Group of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, has been awarded to Carol Ann Peters of Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dell’Informazione “A. Faedo”.

Carol was nominated for her work on the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), the world’s leading forum for evaluating cross language searching systems, which Carol initiated and has run for ten years. This annual evaluation exercise has attracted a multi-disciplinary network of researchers to collaborate on shared tasks, to contribute to the CLEF testing resources, and to meet annually to present and discuss results. In its opening year, CLEF counted 20 participants; thanks to Carol’s hard work, CLEF has expanded year on year to become a major international event in information retrieval related research: in 2009 it attracted over 130 registrations from individual researchers and leading research groups from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas.

The nomination noted that none of this would have happened had it not been for Carol Peter’s initiation and continued drive to run and maintain CLEF. Carol’s tireless work with CLEF has driven the information retrieval community to consider search in more than just the English language that previously dominated information retrieval research; thus she has made an enormous contribution to the awareness and understanding of information retrieval.

Initially, like most of the search evaluation exercises, CLEF adopted a ‘pooled test collection’ approach to evaluation that was adopted by other well known evaluation exercises like TREC. However, again, thanks to Carol’s leadership, CLEF has explored and indeed continues to investigate extensions to this basic model and the development of new metrics for new tasks so as to provide a multifaceted approach to performance evaluation. It is difficult to encapsulate here the huge impact of CLEF. CLEF’s academic output is strong, as evidence by the nearly 3,500 citations to the hundreds of papers presented at CLEF workshops. Multilingual search is garnering more interest in professional circles, where previously nationally-based work tasks have been extended to have international scope. As part of a long term plan to consider future directions, Carol has secured funding through a large number of consecutive EC projects, including the latest ‘TrebleCLEF’ project, which kept CLEF going and provided funding to hold a series of workshops where CLEF partners engaged with researchers and key industrial contacts in order to understand better how CLEF’s outputs were impacting on a series of communities and areas. Carol Peter’s contributions to information retrieval have been many and wide ranging, covering all of the areas for which the Tony Kent Strix Award is offered.

The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented each year in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. Tony Kent made a major contribution to the development of information science both in the UK and internationally, particularly in the field of chemistry. The award is offered in recognition of individuals or groups for an outstanding contribution, practical innovation or achievement in the field of information retrieval. A call for nominations for the 2010 awards will be issued later in the year.

Press Contact Chris Armstrong, Awards, UKeiG.
e-mail: lisqual@cix.co.uk

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.

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.