The Jason Farradane Award is presented in recognition of an outstanding, creative and enterprising contribution to the wider library and information profession. It honours Jason Farradane, who first made an impact on the LIS community with a paper on the ‘scientific approach to documentation’ presented at a Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in 1948. He was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958, alongside the first academic information science courses in 1963 at the precursor to City University, London, where he became Director of the Centre for Information Science in 1966.
The Tony Kent Strix Award was inaugurated in 1998 by the Institute of Information Scientists. It is now presented by UKeiG in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK), the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group (RSC CICAG) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG).
Martin White’s many accomplishments
Martin White FBCS FRSC, HonFCLIP, Principal Analyst at SearchReseach Online, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and an Honorary Fellow of CILIP. He recently retired from his prominent information consultancy role. He began his career as an information officer in the metallurgical industry in 1970. His subsequent career has involved electronic publishing, high-technology market research and information and knowledge management consulting before setting up Intranet Focus Ltd. in 1999. He is a pioneer of the business-critical importance of effective enterprise solutions for information and knowledge search and discoverability.
Through his company, Intranet Focus Ltd, established in 1999, he has provided consultancy services to over 50 organisations, including the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the UN, the European Commission, and many pharmaceutical companies. He is the author of 10 books on intranets, enterprise search and information management and has been a visiting professor at the iSchool, University of Sheffield, since 2002. His SearchResearch blog is a must-read to keep up to date on search. He is a founding member of The Search Network, a group of enterprise search experts.
He has been a frequent speaker at Information Today Europe's Internet Librarian International (ILI) and Taxonomy Boot Camp London (TBCL) conferences, as well as chairing its Enterprise Search Europe conference. For several years, he could be spotted at the Olympia Conference Centre venue for the Information Today Europe conferences, Strix owl under his arm, ready to give the Jason Farradane and Tony Kent Strix awards to that years’ winners. And now he is the recipient. Well deserved, Martin.
Looking to the future
As his career in search and consulting winds down, Martin is changing direction to pay more attention to his organ playing. His plan is to work towards the Associate and Fellow diplomas of the Royal College of Organists. After some 60 years of being a parish church organist, he’s now launched a Substack site for organists, called Manuals and Pedals.
We here at ILI365 eNews, having known Martin for many years, heartily congratulate him on the singular honour of winning both the Jason Farradane and Tony Kent Strix awards and hope to catch up with him soon at an organ concert.