Autumn 2021

In the Autumn 2021 issue

I’ve given a lot of prominence to the forthcoming Search Solutions 2021 event on 23/24 November with Tutorials on the Tuesday  and the Conference on the Wednesday. Apart from one tutorial it will (sadly) be a virtual event. The IRSG AGM will take place at the end of the Conference, and a call for nominations […]

Search Solutions 2021 23/24 November

We had hoped to run the Search Solutions 2021 Conference and Tutorials on-site at the BCS London HQ but constraints on the number of delegates that could be accommodated because of Covid concerns meant that last month we made the decision to go virtual with the Conference (which worked well last year) and with one […]

Call for nominations to the BCS IRSG Committee

The BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group invites nominations for the following positions: – Vice-Chair – Secretary – Inclusion Officer – Six ordinary members of the committee

IRSG web site revisions

The new BCS IRSG web site has been up and running for a couple of months now. The web team at the BCS HQ were a pleasure to work with, and I’d like to thank Simon Curd and Fiona James For their patience and expertise converting my suggestions into the BCS Group template. There are […]

ECIR 2022 Stavanger 10-14 April 2022 

  The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval will take place on site in Stavanger, Norway.  Sessions will also be streamed for delegates who are not able to travel to Norway. There has been a very good response to the invitations to all the sections of this conference. The conference team has set up an […]

IR and ACL Anthologies

The US equivalent of IRSG is SIGIR, which publishes its Forum newsletter every six months. This is always a very good read and you do not have to be a member of SIGIR to do so. One of the feature articles in the June issue (which only came online in October!) is an introduction to […]

Big Information and big budgets

The concept of Big Data has been around for some time. John Mashey at Silicon Graphics is usually credited with inventing the term in a presentation he gave in 1998. Without doubt big data is very difficult to manage and the demand for people with data science skills never seems to slow down. However much […]

History of the Institute of Information Scientists 1958-2002

Over the last two years I have been working with Dr. Sandra Ward and Professor Charles Oppenheim in writing a history of the Institute of Information Scientists. The IIS was founded in 1958, largely due to the vision and commitment of Jason Farradane and the support of G. Malcolm Dyson. The IIS merged/was taken over […]

Book Review ‘Between the spreadsheets’ Susan Walsh

The full title of this book is Between the Spreadsheets – Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data. What a superb title! It makes you smile before you even open the book. At last there is a book that focuses on content quality and does so in a very practical way. Susan Walsh (aka The Classification Guru) […]

Events Autumn 2021

Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.

And finally….

I suspect that the name G. Malcolm Dyson in the History of the IIS item above will be unfamiliar to anyone who has not been in chemical information retrieval for quite a number of decades. Dyson developed a linear notation for organic chemical compounds in 1946, initially with a view to supporting the use of […]