From the Chair….
Greetings SIGIR members! The Executive Committee, Forum Editors, and other volunteers whorun SIGIR on your behalf have been busy lately. The news is all good, but we’ll start with themost significant first.

AwardsC. J. “Keith” van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow) was named an ACM Fellow inrecognition of his many years of leadership and research excellence in information retrieval.
Keith has made important contributions to probabilistic and logic-based retrieval models, hewrote an IR book that has been used for 25 years, and he has been advisor and mentor to an
impressive, and impressively large, group of IR researchers. See Sue Dumais’ article about
Keith elsewhere in this issue. Congratulations Keith!
Kathy McKeown (Columbia University) was also named an ACM Fellow. Although Kathy ismore closely identified with natural language processing research than IR, she contributes to IR
through her work on NLP and text summarization, she has published in the SIGIR conference,
she has served on SIGIR conference program committees, and some of her students are active
members of the IR community. Congratulations Kathy!
Keith, Kathy, and the other 28 new Fellows will be recognized formally at the ACM Awards
Banquet on June 5, 2004.

SIGIR 2007
SIGIR 2007 will be located in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam. Wessel Kraaij, Arjen de Vries,
and Djoerd Hiemstra will lead the effort (and of course many of you will help). Amsterdam is
known for its relaxed atmosphere, excellent museums, scenic canals, diverse restaurants, andgood international travel connections. It should be fun!
We sincerely thank Josiane Mothe for organizing an excellent and detailed bid to host theconference in Toulouse, France. SIGIR rarely has the luxury of selecting from two so evenly
matched bids.

Member Benefits
Several years ago SIGIR began offering a membership option called the SIGIR Proceedings
Package, which costs an additional $30 per year. It provides the member with printed copies ofCIKM and JCDL conference proceedings (conferences sponsored by SIGIR). About 10% of
SIGIR members now subscribes to this package.
In July SIGIR will begin offering a new membership option called the Digital Symposium
Collection, which will cost an additional $10 per year. It provides the member with a DVD
containing proceedings and newsletters from a large number of information retrieval, database,

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and related conferences, workshops, and SIGs. SIGIR, CIKM, JCDL, SIGMOD, and SIGKDD
are included.
If these membership options interest you, be sure to look for them under the “Member PlusPackages” heading when you renew your SIGIR membership.
If you are a member of ACM, you might be interested to know that ACM has enhanced its
Virtual Business Card (Vcard) service to include a URL Forwarding Service. This free service
enables you to use the URL http://vcard.acm.org/~[your alias], where “your alias” is the nameused with your acm.org email forwarding address. Once you log in to your Vcard, you canenable URL forwarding or modify the information displayed on the Vcard. Check out the ACM
Web pages for details.

Forum Changes
In the past SIGIR Forum was published in two regular issues (Spring, Fall) and a Special issue(the SIGIR conference proceedings). The regular issue names made sense when SIGIR members
were mostly from North America and Europe, but now South America, Australia, and Asia arehome for many SIGIR members. In recognition of SIGIR’s increasingly global presence, SIGIR
Forum regular issues will now be named after the months in which they are generally published:
June and December.
The Forum Editors and SIGIR Executive Committee have also revised and clarified Forum’s
editorial policies. See the inside of the back cover for details.

In Cooperation Conferences
HTL/NAACL 2004 and CIVR 2004 will both be held “in cooperation” with SIGIR. When aconference is “in cooperation” with SIGIR, you get the lowest registration rate. Check the
http://www.sigir.org/ Web site before you register for an IR-related conference. If it is “incooperation” with SIGIR, be sure to mention your SIGIR membership when you register for theconference.

SIGIR Services
ACM now requires each SIG to publish a list of the services it provides to its members. We
hope that you already know what services SIGIR offers, but in case you are curious, see
http://www.sigir.org/services.html.
Active and opinionated members are one of SIGIR’s strengths. If you think of ways that SIGIR
can be improved, please let me know by email. SIGIR is run by volunteers, so there is a limit towhat we can accomplish by ourselves. However, with your help, we can accomplish greatthings.
Jamie Callan
chair_sigir@acm.org

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