The Tony Kent Strix Award, given by the UK eInformation Group of CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, has been awarded to Carol Ann Peters of Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologia dell'Informazione "A. Faedo".
Carol was nominated for her work on the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), the world's leading forum for evaluating cross language searching systems, which Carol initiated and has run for ten years. This evaluation exercise has attracted a multi-disciplinary network of researchers to collaborate on shared tasks and to meet annually to present and discuss results. Thanks to Carol's hard work, CLEF has expanded year over year to become a major international event in information retrieval related research, attracting participation from leading research groups from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas. Carol's tireless work with CLEF has driven the information retrieval community to consider search in more than just the English language that previously dominated information retrieval research; thus she has made an enormous contribution to the awareness and understanding of information retrieval.
It is difficult to encapsulate here the huge impact of CLEF. Multilingual search is garnering more interest in professional circles, where previously nationally-based work tasks have been extended to have international scope. Carol’s contributions to information retrieval have been many and wide ranging, covering all of the areas for which the Tony Kent Strix Award is offered. The Tony Kent Strix Award is presented each year in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. Tony Kent made a major contribution to the development of information science both in the UK and internationally. The award is offered in recognition of individuals or groups for an outstanding contribution, practical innovation or achievement in the field of information retrieval.
