information retrieval community

The Information Retrieval (IR) community has a lot to offer regarding
the search experience, and therefore the ideas behind much of "next
generation" library catalogs. Their experience is long and rich.
Below is a list of the tutorials taking place at IR annual conference
this year. Food for thought:

   * Conducting Interactive IR User Studies by Diane Kelly from the
     University of North Carolina

   * Introduction to Web Retrieval and Advertising by Ricardo
     Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo
     Research

   * Introduction to Text Mining by David Lewis of Lewis Consulting

   * The Probabilistic Relevance Model: BM25 and Beyond by Hugo
     Zaragoza and Stephen Robertson from Yahoo Research and Microsoft
     Research

   * Cross-Language Information Access by Jianqiang Wang and Daqing
     He from SUNY Buffalo and the University of Pittsburgh

   * Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning for IR by Yi Zhang and
     Rong Jin from UC Santa Cruz and Michigan State University

   * XML Retrieval: Integrated IR-DB Challenges and Solutions by
     Sihem Amer-Yahia, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Mariano Consens, and
     Mounia Lalmas from Yahoo Research, University of Toronto, and
     Queen Mary University London

   * Introduction to Recommender Systems by Joseph Konstan from
     University of Minnesota

   http://www.sigir2007.org/tutorials.html

Other useful communities include:

   * JCDL - http://www.jcdl2007.org/
   * ECDL - http://www.ecdl2007.org/

I know there are more. We are not in this by ourselves.

--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame