Discovery and Discoverability: New Ideas, Techniques and Products

This afternoon seminar is to be held at Senate House, London and will provide an update on new ideas, techniques, tools and products in library, publishing and scholarly discovery systems. With such systems now embedded in publisher websites, in library services and through general web searching, it might be imagined that there is little need for further innovation. This meeting will focus on recent developments including a keynote presentation from Mounia Lalmas, the Research Director of Yahoo, on Social Media and Discovery and presentations from Dr Emine Yilmaz, Reader at UCL and consultant to Microsoft on advances in search and retrieval systems and Michael Upshall on the potential application of AI. Another theme will illustrate how digital content is being enhanced to improve discoverability and agreed speakers will include case studies from Europeana and how they have gone about semantically enhancing the European dataset given issues of multilingual content and different data sources. John Baker of Digirati will provide case studies of semantic enhancement for publisher web sites. Finally new company Yewno.com will describe a new product for conceptual discovery currently being trialled in a number of US academic libraries.

The meeting will be Chaired by Kate Price – Chair of UKSG – and there will be panel session at the end of the afternoon with Nick Canty, of UCL Centre for Publishing and John Akeroyd Honorary Research Fellow at UCL and consultant with CIBER Research. A detailed programme will follow in due course.

The seminar is co-sponsored by University College London, Centre for Publishing, Ciber Research and Learned Publishing. It will be at the usual UCL favourable rate of £110 with a discounted rate for students. Please post or email completed application forms to malvia.plante@ucl.ac.uk. Room G12 Foster Court, University College London, Dept. of Information Studies, London, WC1E 6BT.