FROM THE CHAIR …

As your newly elected Chair, I first want to applaud the membership of SIGIR for their active
participation in our election and governing processes. SIGIR is a remarkably vital organization and hadenough interested and involved members to stand three nominees for each office – a very healthy sign.
Thanks to all who stood for office, and those who voted.
I am honored to be your chair, and as a long-time, active member, I am very mindful of theresponsibility that each chair assumes, and will work with the officers, regional reps, volunteers, and all
our membership to bring SIGIR to ever greater heights, while maintaining our strong links to a vibranthistory.
Please review Dave’s notes from the Annual Meeting for all the details on membership, conferences,and budget for what has been an active year and a VERY successful conference in Amsterdam in July.
The venues, the city, our Dutch hosts, the social activities (as well as the tutorials, doctoral consortium,workshops, posters, and papers of course) were all terrific. With a record 599 folks in attendance, SIGIR
set a new record for attendees at a SIGIR Conference held in Europe. Co-chairs Wessel Kraaij and Arjen
de Vries are to be congratulated for a truly memorable conference. And I am sure they would thank all
the hard-working volunteers who contributed to the conference’s success.
A few particulars that were discussed briefly at the Annual Meeting on which I want to again elicit yourthoughts.
1) How might we retain as SIGIR members those who received membership as part oftheir registration for an Annual Conference? While our membership is always boosted by
new members when they register for a conference, these members tend to fall off if they
don’t attend the next year’s conference – and this is highly likely as the conference
moves in such geographically dramatic bounds.
2) What are the pros and cons of an Industry Event, as was held in Amsterdam?
Presenters at the event included SAP, IBM, Orcatec, Baidu, Fredhopper, Google,Microsoft, Yahoo, Scirus, Endeca, and Linguit. There was also a Practitioners Panel fromthe Royal Dutch National Library, the Royal Dutch National Police, the RTL Group, andTNO. While we definitely want to welcome all corporate members, is a separate event
and invitation-only attendance the best model?
3) Should we continue the mentorship program whose goal is to support researchers whowant to submit to the SIGIR Conference, but are new to SIGIR? Mark Sanderson
reported that in an earlier survey, opinions were split, with mentees valuing it, while thementor-reviewers were ambivalent, find it very time-consuming, with very few papers(this year only 1) being accepted. While there was support from some in the audience, theconcern was also expressed that if the limited resource of knowledgeable reviewers isexpended on this effort, will it become even more challenging to find sufficient reviewers
for papers and posters? Of course, there is the opposing need to expand the group ofresearchers who are successful in their submission to the conference.
Please send me your thoughts and ideas on these questions at liddy@syr.edu and I will share them withthe Executive Committee so that we can include your views when we consider these issues.
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In closing, let me say what I so frequently share with the doctoral students in our school – what a truly
opportune time for each of us to have chosen the information field. We are indeed either fortunate orbrilliant to have chosen to work in this field at a time when the importance of access to information isrecognized by virtually everyone as being so vital in every domain.
But as we relish the current accomplishments of our field and look with anticipation to an even more
exciting future, it is important for us to remember and build upon what we learn from the work of thepast. And the vitality and still-impressive importance of prior research was made very evident during a
special session in Amsterdam, where we all listened to the video-taped acceptance speech of KarenSpärck Jones for the ACM Athena Award – that was made before Karen’s death in April, 2007. As weviewed the video, we all were again reminded of both the creative insight and practicality thatcharacterized Karen’s outstanding contributions to our field.
Looking forward, I hope there will be many SIGIR members at our co-sponsored and in-cooperation
conferences – CIKM, JCDL, AIRS, CORIA, CIVR, ECIR, and WSDM – and of course next summer at
the ACM SIGIR Conference in Singapore on July 20th to 24th. Stay tuned to the conference website
www.sigir2008.org for details and deadlines.
Liz Liddy
Chair_sigir@acm.org

ACM SIGIR Forum2Vol. 41 No. 2 December 2007