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.