Issue 48

Newsletter

Issue 48

February 1998

A Festschrift for our President!Michael Lynch writes:

I retired last year from the Department of Information Studies at Sheffield University, which I joined as a Research Fellow in June 1965 when it was still known as the Postgraduate School of Librarianship. Previously I had worked at Chemical Abstracts Service, where I was much involved in early work on representing chemical structure information in the Registry System and with the design of novel publication types involving structural information.

To mark my retirement, Professor Peter Willett (as Guest Editor) and colleagues in the Department and other associates prepared a Festschrift issue of the Journal of Documentation (Volume 54 No. 1, January 1998). This was a well-kept secret – it had been in preparation for almost two years, and the first I knew of it was when my wife, on a pretext, brought me to Aslib where I found Angela Haygarth-Jackson, Chair of the Journal of Documentation Editorial Board, and her colleagues, as well as the authors of the papers, assembled to present a copy of the issue to me.

The issue comprises the following papers:

“Redesigning the University Library in the Digital Age” by Professor Tom Wilson (until recently Head of Department for 15 years);
“In Search of the Unknown User: Indexing, Hypertext and the World Wide Web” by David Ellis, Nigel Ford and Jonathan Furner;
“Applications of n-Grams in Textual Information Systems” by Sandy Robertson and Peter Willett;
“Information Extraction: Beyond Document Retrieval” by Robert Gaizauskas and Yorick Wilks (colleagues from the Department of Computer Science at Sheffield)
“Chemical Patents and Structural Information – the Sheffield Research in Context” by Geoff Downs and John Barnard (long-time associates who now operate as Barnard Chemical Information in Sheffield).

These articles are preceded by a very generous appreciation of my research by Peter Willett.

There could be no more welcome accolade to a researcher than a Festschrift prepared by research colleagues in an institution which provided a long-term base for the work which my research students and research associates undertook, and where colleagues were immensely supportive at all stages, especially department heads who include Wilf Saunders, Tom Wilson and now Pete Willett. Equally, many friends and colleagues outside the institution were also hugely supportive of our work. I have always been conscious of the fact that our research projects lengthened significantly over the years, from a year or two, initially, to an eighteen-year project at the end. Also, the generic chemical structures project, first thought up in 1979, was a direct result of the OSTI-funded study of the requirements for chemical patent information systems which was chaired by Angela Haygarth-Jackson – a nice example of an interconnected network.

I have sometimes said that I survived as a researcher by digging deep narrow holes and disregarding most of what was happening elsewhere. Indeed, I had come to think of myself latterly as one of those prairie dogs which surfaces once every so often to look about at the surrounding area to see what’s new, then goes below the surface again to get on with its work.

Michael F Lynch
Professor Emeritus
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield

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