Prof. Peter Ingwersen, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark

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Peter Ingwersen became lecturer at the Royal School of Librarianship (now: Royal School of Library and Information Science), Copenhagen in 1973, after having graduated in Library and Information Studies at the school in the same year. Until 1982 he lectured on information storage and retrieval, cataloguing and indexing theory. From 1976 to 1980 he carried out experimental research on cognitive aspects of processes concerned with user-intermediary-system interaction. In 1982 he obtained a two-year leave to join the online service staff of the Information Retrieval Service, the European Space Agency (ESA-IRS), Frascati, Italy as ESA Research Fellow. His R & D activities were concerned with user-system interface improvements, the development of a new family of online support tools still in operation, and systems management. Back at the Royal School of Librarianship as associate professor from 1984, he worked in a new department dealing with IRM and design of specialized information services and systems for industry. During the Spring-term 1987 he served as visiting professor at Rutgers University, NJ, USA, invited by the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. In 1996 he was visiting professor at Keio University, Dept. of Library and Information Science, Tokyo, Japan, and from 1997 he is visiting professor (Docent) at Åbo Academy University, Dept. of Information Studies. From 1999-2002 he is visiting professor at Tampere University, Dept. of Information Studies, Finland, sponsored by the Nordic Research Academy (Norfa). As the driving force behind the curriculum development of the MSc programme in Library and Information Science at the Royal School of Librarianship he was appointed head of this programme from 1990, and from July 1993 head of the Dept. of Information Retrieval Theory. As of January 2001 he is Research Professor at the Dept. of Information Studies at the school. In 1991 he obtained his Ph.D. degree from Copenhagen Business School, Faculty of Economics, Department of Informatics and Management with a doctoral dissertation on Intermediary Functions in Information Retrieval Interaction. He has been member of more than ten professorial evaluation boards in USA and several doctoral examination committees in UK, Australia, Denmark, Finland, and Norway. He currently supervises three research student projects on interactive IR evaluation methods, web structures, and a thesaurus application in information management. He has served in several Esprit projects as expert consultant on design of knowledge-based IR interfaces and systems. As consultant, he has developed the information system of the Danish Parliament and served as EEC reviewer on the ESPRIT II projects SIMPR and FERMI. He participated in the LTR project Mira on multimedia retrieval and evaluation. As Conference Chairman he organized the 15th ACM-SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, held in Copenhagen, June 1992, and the 2nd international conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, CoLIS 2, 1996. He has been Programme Chair twice for the ACM-SIGIR conference. He is member of the editorial boards of Journal of Documentation, Information Processing & Management, ARIST, Cybermetrics and Scientometrics, and he was appointed Fellow of the Library Association, UK, 1990. He received the Jason Farradane Award, 1993, and the 1994 ASIS/New Jersey Award for his work on the cognitive approach to Information Retrieval. He is co-chair of the Nordic Research Network for Information Studies (NORDISnet) sponsored by NorFA, 1998- as well as of the DissaNet in the Republic of South Africa, sponsored by the Danish Development Agency, 1998-2000.