FROM THE CHAIR …
Greetings,
While last July’s Annual Meeting in Boston may now seem a long time ago to many of you, I am still
reminded of it in various conversations either with the SIGIR officers, the ACM organization, orcolleagues from our professional community. All in all, it was a tremendous success with 535 main
conference attendees at a time when there was great uncertainty, given the economy, as to how good theattendance would be, and to how the first Industry Day held in the middle of the conference would fare.
Co-Chairs James Allan and Jay Aslam, and their supporting committees, did a terrific job, and ran ahigh-quality, lively, well-functioning conference, from the thematically organized poster session, to themagnificent setting of the Kennedy Library for the Annual Banquet, to the excellent individual papers,
to our triennial awarding of the Gerard Salton Award to Sue Dumais, who gave a very reflective andprovocative opening keynote address, titled, An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Information Retrieval.
The minutes from the Business Meeting in Boston, authored by Dave Lewis, Secretary of SIGIR, areincluded in this issue, and I encourage all of our members who were not able to attend the Annual
Meeting to read them in order to catch up with what’s happening in SIGIR, especially the upcoming
SIGIR Conferences. In summary, 2010 will be held in Geneva, Switzerland, 2011 will be held in
Beijing, China, and 2012 will be held in Portland, Oregon. The review of bids for 2013 is currently
ongoing and the decision will be made before our 2010 Meeting in Geneva.
Early in 2010, election of SIGIR officers will be held, with four positions being filled for three year,
non-renewable terms. Mark Sanderson is Chair of the Nominating Committee, and has sought
nominations via the IR-LIST. Information on the elections, including notices of the candidates, theirposition statements, and ballots will be shared via IR-LIST. I encourage our SIGIR members to watch
for this information and to be sure to vote.
One particular action that new members, and therefore, first-time readers of this column can take insupport of SIGIR is to continue your membership in SIGIR. This is in addition to your overall ACM
membership. If you were a first time SIGIR Conference attendee in Boston (of which there were 286),
you received a one-year free membership in SIGIR with your conference registration. It is important toSIGIR that we retain you as members, particularly in the years in which the conference is not located inyour sphere of the world. If IR, or its now many related areas of research, are your focus, we in SIGIR
are dedicated to serving you by remaining the field’s signature professional organization, and inexchange we ask that you maintain your membership with us between the SIGIR conferences youattend. So when you next get a notice from ACM on renewing your membership, please do remember
to also renew your membership in SIGIR.
In summary, SIGIR has had another productive and successful year, with important intellectual andprofessional contributions. Our conference in Boston was successful in all senses, with strong technicalcontent and good international participation, and our financial situation is quite healthy. Perhaps mostimportantly, we continue to have very strong participation in ACM SIGIR by our members, especially intheir willingness to serve as volunteers for conference and SIG-related activities. For this, the SIGIR
Executive Committee is very grateful.
Cheers,Liz Liddy

ACM SIGIR Forum1Vol. 43 No. 2 December 2009