Pia Borlund of the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway has been revealed as the winner of the Tony Kent Strix Memorial Award for 2018. The award was made in recognition of her contributions to the field of information retrieval.
Professor Borlund was nominated for the award by Diane H. Sonnenwald, Emerita Professor of Library & Information Studies at University College Dublin, and received unanimous praise and support from the Strix judging panel.
"Similar to the memorable Dr Tony Kent, the work by Borlund is original and innovative, and has had a significant impact on information retrieval (IR) research and applications. Her approaches are analytical and practical, and her devotion and dedication to users and interactive information retrieval (IIR) are outstanding. Within the IR community, Borlund is known for her innovative contributions to IR user studies, evaluations and test design, including strong, novel methodological contributions to IIR evaluation. In particular, she is recognised for the development of her IIR evaluation model which uniquely employs simulated work task situations. Borlund developed the IIR evaluation model as a doctoral student by taking up the challenges of the calls put forward by Professor Stephen Robertson (recipient of the first Tony Kent Strix Award in 1998) and Micheline Hancock-Beaulieu, in their iconic 1992 paper on IR systems evaluation."
The Award is presented by the UK electronic information Group (UKeiG), in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organization 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). The award was presented by Doug Veal (Strix Chair) and David Ball (UKeiG Chair) and accepted by Dr Andrew MacFarlane on Professor Borlund’s behalf on the afternoon of Friday November 23rd 2018, at the Geological Society, Piccadilly, London.
Professor Borlund will present the next Strix Memorial Lecture on Friday November 29th, 2019 at the same venue. "I’m very pleased and very, very honoured to receive the Tony Kent Strix Award. It’s an honour to join the past recipients who I have admired and respected since I was a student. I thank Professor Diane Sonnenwald for the nomination."
Retrieval as interaction
At this year’s event, 2017 Strix award winner, Maarten de Rijke, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam, presented on 'Retrieval as Interaction'. Professor de Rijke has a formidable high impact publications record in a range of areas including semantic search, semi-structured retrieval and social media. He has produced influential research outputs on the large-scale semantic analysis of online content and on the analysis of subjective aspects of information (sentiment, credibility, memory, reputation and experiences). His contributions to information retrieval, to the fast-evolving areas of computational methods for analysing, understanding and enabling effective human interaction with information sources, have been profound.
The afternoon was streamed live to the 17th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR2018), at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, so over 170 international delegates got to see Professor de Rijke’s lecture.
A recording can be accessed here: https://tinyurl.com/ybrpbqnx
Stella Dextre Clarke, winner of the Tony Kent Strix Award in 2006, also reflected on 'Then and Now: Contrasts in the Scope of Information Retrieval.’ Now retired from consultancy in information management, she is still active as Vice-Chair of the UK Chapter of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization).
A recording of her presentation can be accessed here: https://tinyurl.com/y8qca6ef
The Tony Kent Strix Award was inaugurated in 1998 by the Institute of Information Scientists but is now administered by the UK electronic information Group. For more information about UKeiG and the Tony Kent Strix Award visit:
https://tinyurl.com/ybjfjotu
or email Gary Horrocks at: info.ukeig@cilip.org.uk for further information.
A call for nominations for next year will be issued early in 2019, and don’t forget to put the afternoon of Friday November 29th, 2019 in your diary.
UKeiG is a Special Interest Group of CILIP: the library and information association:
https://www.cilip.org.uk/