Dear colleagues

This is to remind you that Early Bird registration with reduced fees for bookings for the ISKO UK 2011 Conference  ends on Friday 29th April. After that date the standard fees will be payable. You can find out more details of the event and register via “Registration” on the conference site.

This multi-faceted conference honours the life and achievements of Brian C Vickery, a pioneer in our field. The venue is the Roberts building University College London, with the theme Facets of Knowledge Organization. Places are limited and this will be an intimate, lively and engaging event

It will include 29 first-class presentations, reflecting not just current research but also the challenges of turning R&D results into practice. Posters will enliven the networking breaks.

Once again, we have attracted speakers from several countries as well the UK, and are delighted to welcome them to the Conference. Brian Vickery would have been thrilled with the range on offer, and with the rich mix of speakers giving their papers on topics from faceted classification to tagging behaviour and the exploitation of linked data at the BBC. The revival of Jason Farradane’s work on relational indexing would have caught his attention too.

This year the Proceedings will be published and sent to all those attending the Conference, including not only the presented papers, but a selection of papers either by, or about, Brian Vickery.

Our keynote speakers include Stephen Robertson, who, after leaving the Aslib Research Department under Brian Vickery, spent many years leading the Centre for Interactive Systems at City University and is now a full-time researcher at the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge; and Amanda Spink, recently appointed to the Chair in Information Science at Loughborough University, moving from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.

It is a pleasure also to include a session selected and hosted by our colleagues in NKOS (Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services). Another session is dedicated to an appreciation of Vickery’s legacy. The full programme can be found on the conference web site.

We look forward to your participation in this event.

ISKO is a not-for-profit scientific/professional association with the objective of promoting research and communication in the domain of knowledge organization, within the broad field of information science and related disciplines. Founded in 2007, our UK Chapter has been attracting lively and steadily growing audiences to its afternoon meeting series as well as its very successful first conference in 2009.

Fran Huckle

ISKO UK Conference Publicity

***With apologies for cross posting***