UKeiG Student Conference Award

UKeiG would like to remind students that it offers awards to UK undergraduate and postgraduate students in UK schools or departments of librarianship, information studies, information science, knowledge management or information management running courses accredited by CILIP.

The Student Conference Award is offered to enable a student to attend a UK-based conference relevant to their professional studies (e.g. LILAC, The CILIP Umbrella Conference, the Online Information Meeting)

Applications are accepted throughout the year. The grant awarded may not cover all costs. UKeiG reserves the right to withhold the award. It is a condition of winning support that a short ‘conference report’ is presented for publication in our journal, eLucidate.

Nominations should take the form of a letter detailing the benefits to be gained from attending the conference, as well as details of the conference, including date and place, and the costs for which support is sought.

All enquiries to awards@ukeig.org.uk

For more information on UKeiG awards see: http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/index.html

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.

Call for Nominations for the UKeiG Awards

There is still time to nominate a colleague for one of these awards:

The UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award and the UKeiG Jason Farradane Award

UKeiG is now seeking nominations for these two prestigious awards, presented annually at the December Online Information Meeting in London. Both awards are sponsored by The Journal of Information Science, published by Sage Publications and both honour achievement in the broad field of information management.

The UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award is presented for an outstanding contribution to the narrower field of information retrieval, while the UKeiG Jason Farradane Award recognises brilliant work in information science. The deadline for both awards is Friday 14^th September 2007. Details of the individual awards together with the addresses to which nominations should be sent are given below and at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/index.html.

UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award

Nominations should be for achievement that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• development of, or significant improvement in, mechanisms for the retrieval of information, either generally or in a specialised field;
• development of, or significant improvement in, accessibility to an information service;
• a sustained contribution over a period of years to the field of information retrieval; for example, by running an information service or by contributing at national or international level to organisations active in the field;
• a major and/or sustained contribution to the theoretical or experimental understanding of the information retrieval process;
• a major contribution to fostering the education, training and/or general awareness of the importance and the technicalities of information retrieval.

Key characteristics that the judges will look for in nominations are innovation, initiative, originality and practicality.

Nominations should take the form of a short description (no more than 3 sides of A4) of the work in question, together with full contact details of both the nominee and the nominator. Do not forget to include any documentation, references or URLs which may support the nomination. Nominations should reach the judges by Friday September 14th 2007.

Nominations will be judged by a panel of experts, and the statuette of an owl will be presented to the winner during the annual Online Information Meeting in London in December.

The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented 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 retrieval and information services both in the UK and internationally, particularly in the field of chemistry. The name Strix was chosen both to reflect Tony's interest in ornithology, and the name of one of the last and most successful information retrieval packages which he created.

Past winners have been Stella Dextre Clarke (2006); Jack Mills (2005); Professor Cornelis Joost (Keith) van Rijsbergen (2004); Dr Herbert van Sompel (2003); Malcolm Jones (2002); Professor Peter Willett (2001); Dr Martin Porter (2000); Dr Donna Harman (1999); Professor Stephen Robertson (1998).

Nominations for the 2007 Award are now invited, and should be sent with full supporting documentation to:

Alan Gilchrist
32 Friar Road
Brighton
BN1 6NH
UK
Tel: 01273 705226
E-mail: cura@fastnet.co.uk

UKeiG Jason Farradane Award

Nominations should be for achievement that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• raising the profile of the information profession within an organisation or field of endeavour in a way which can or has become an exemplar to others;
• raising the awareness of the value of information in the workplace;
• development of a significant new information product or service;
• development of a product or service that has made a significant impact on the availability and accessibility of information.

Key characteristics that the judges will look for in nominations are innovation, initiative, originality and significance.

Nominations should take the form of a short description (no more than 3 sides of A4) of the work in question, together with full contact details of both the nominee and the nominator. Do not forget to include any documentation, references or URLs which may support the nomination. Nominations should reach the judges by Friday September 14th 2007

Nominations will be judged by a panel of experts, and the award will be presented to the winner during the annual Online Information Meeting in London in December.

Jason Farradane graduated in chemistry in 1929 at what is now Imperial College and started work in industry as a chemist and documentalist. He was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS) in 1958 and the first academic courses in information science in 1960 at the precursor of City University, where he became Director of the Centre for Information Science in 1966. On the research side his main contributions lay in relational analysis, which can now perhaps be seen as providing a precursor to work in the area of A.I., and the concept of information. He saw information science as a step towards understanding and better organizing ourselves. The IIS first presented the award in 1979, to Jason Farradane.

Previous award winners have included University of Warwick Library for The Learning Grid; Michael Koenig; Bruce Royan; Michael Keen; Newcastle University Library; Sandra Ward; Phil Williams and Phil Holmes.

Nominations for the 2007 Award are now invited, and should be sent with full supporting documentation to:

Christine Baker
Piglet Cottage
Redmire
Leyburn
North Yorkshire
DL8 4EH
Tel & Fax: 01969 625751
E-mail: cabaker@ukeig.org.uk

The closing date for nominations is Friday September 14th 2007.

Notes:

UKeiG is an established professional group for all information professionals, users and developers of electronic information resources. The Group encourages communication and the exchange of best practice and knowledge across all sectors; and offers an e-journal, a mailing list, an annual programme of training courses; and an array of awards and bursaries. UKeiG is a Special Interest Group of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE. Registered Charity No. 313014.

SAGE Publications (www.sagepub.co.uk) is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore

TheJournal of Information Science is an international journal of high repute covering topics of interest to all those researching and working in the sciences of information and knowledge management. The Journal seeks to achieve a better understanding of the principles that underpin the effective creation, organization, storage, communication and utilization of information and knowledge resources. It also seeks to understand how policy and practice in the area can be built on sound theoretical or heuristic foundations to achieve a greater impact on the world economy. http://jis.sagepub.com/

SLA Europe Information Professional 2007: Call for Nominations

Posted on behalf of Penny Leach, SLA Board

The Board of SLA Europe would like to remind you that the closing date for nominations for the SLA Europe Information Professional 2007 Award (SLA Europe IP 2007) is 28th February 2007.

The goal of the annual Information Professional Award is to recognise outstanding achievement in the information profession amongst those living and working in Europe, so this is a chance to gain recognition for a professional colleague or yourself.

The winner receives an expenses-paid trip to the SLA Conference in
Denver, June 2007. The nominator of the winner will receive a magnum of champagne.

Further information about the Award, including past winners, can be
found on the SLA Europe web site. The from is available in Word and PDF. All you need to do at this stage is complete the form and email it to Penny Leach (penny.leach@gs.com), including a short statement as to why the nominee should be considered (and attaching any relevant information). You do not need to be a member of SLA to nominate or be nominated.

The Award is sponsored by sponsored by Factiva.

UKeiG Awards - photos

For anyone unable to attend Online Information 2006 last December, and hence unable to be at the presentation of our two awards:

• UKeiG Jason Farradane Award
• UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award

there are photographs of the presentations on the centre pages of Information World Review and on the Online Information Awards pages.

The winner of the 2006 Jason Farradane Award was the University of Warwick Library 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 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 information techniques and approaches. The Learning Grid will directly impact the lives of all students in the University of Warwick but its impact will be felt more widely as other institutions follow their lead across the world.

The winner of the 2006 Tony Kent Strix Award for advancing the field of information retrieval was Stella Dextre Clarke. The award is given in recognition of her sterling work in developing first the Government Category List and then its successor the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary - known as IPSV (or "ippsvee" to its friends). 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.

Stella's expansive expertise in the area of vocabulary is also widely recognised outside government circles. She has played a pivotal role in revising and updating BS 5723 (Structured vocabularies for information retrieval) chairing the working party and building international support for the conclusions. Stella's nomination upholds the spirit of the Tony Kent Strix award - an outstanding contribution to information retrieval - practically focused but grounded in the best principles of information science.

The call for nominations for the 2007 Awards will take place in April 2007. Further details can be found on the UKeiG website at:
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/index.html

Both awards are sponsored by SAGE Publications, a leading international publisher of journals, books and electronic media for scholarly, educational and professional markets.