URL correction:

http://www.iskouk.org/AgendaIR_June2008.htm


*** apologies for cross posting ***

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)

Three eminent speakers Stephen Robertson, Brian Vickery and Ian Rowlands
will address issues that have dominated the information retrieval agenda
since the 1950s, and still present challenges and opportunities for the
future. Questions from the audience will be encouraged and ample
discussion time will be provided.
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.htm


SPEAKERS/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 and
writing 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. He is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; he won the Tony Kent
Strix award in 1998 and the Gerard Salton award in 2000. Stephen 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.

*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.