[ok-london-announce] ISKO UK Event, London, 26 June - Agenda for Information Retrieval

[Jonathan Gray]

I thought this could be of interest. I'm going to try and go along...

Jonathan

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ISKO UK Event, London, 26 June - Agenda for Information Retrieval

We would like to invite you to an open meeting of the British Chapter of
International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) entitled
"Agenda for Information Retrieval" in London,

26th June 2008 15:00 - 19:00 (registration starts 14:30).

Venue: University College London, Engineering Faculty, Roberts Building G06

Cost: 10 GBP (ISKO UK members free)

Searching, browsing, and other routes to information are no longer the
preserve of information professionals; they are on every desktop, at the
fingertips of almost anybody. “Search” has become part of the everyday
lifestyle.

Three eminent speakers Brian Vickery, Stephen Robertson and Ian Rowlands
will address the issues that have dominated the information retrieval
agenda since the 1950s, and still present challenges and opportunities
for the future.

This ISKO UK event is organized in cooperation with UCL's School of
Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS).

For full details on the venue, programme and to book your place at the
event visit http://www.iskouk.org/AgendaIR_June2008.htm


SPEAKERS AND TOPICS

Brian Vickery will take a look back at the development of information
retrieval, and some of the problems it has faced. A chemist at the start
of his career, Brian Vickery has had enormous influence on knowledge
organization since 1952, as one of the founder members of the
Classification Research Group. He served also at the (then) National
Lending Library in Boston Spa, the University of Manchester Institute of
Science and Technology, and from 1966 to 1973 as Research Director of
Aslib. This post was followed by ten years as Director of the School of
Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London.
Despite his formal retirement in 1983, Brian has continued working
actively in the information field ever since.

For the last ten years Stephen Robertson has been a researcher at the
Microsoft Research Laboratory. He previously spent twenty years at City
University, where he started the Centre for Interactive Systems Research
and still retains a part-time professorship. His work on probabilistic
theory underpins the algorithms behind every serious search engine
today. But for this talk, he will give a non-technical overview of some
current concerns of core IR research, in particular on the use of
different kinds of evidence in searching and ranking. He is a Fellow of
Girton College, Cambridge; he won the Tony Kent Strix Award in 1998 and
the Gerard Salton Award in 2000.

Ian Rowlands will ensure we see the issues from the all-important
perspective of the user. He is the author of the recently published
report on searching behaviour of the ‘Google generation', commissioned
by JISC and the British Library. Ian is Senior Lecturer at SLAIS, UCL,
and a member of its CIBER research group. He was formerly at City
University from 1993, leading the MSc Information Science course, and
before joining City worked for Pira International, a contract research
organisation . His teaching interests are in scholarly communication,
journal publishing, bibliometrics and research methods.