Reflections on Receiving the ASIS&T 2016 Award of Merit

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

At the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Copenhagen, Peter Ingwersen expressed surprise and gratitude for being honored with the Association's 2016 Award of Merit. The professor emeritus from Denmark's Royal School of Library and Information Science thanked peers for recognizing him as a mentor and research originator. Ingwersen observed that his own areas of research in interactive information retrieval (IR) and scientometrics/webometrics have come together as converging lines of interest, though research and analysis are often restricted by system and feature limitations. Experimentation, Ingwersen stated, is too little focused on the effective workings of IR models and contexts, repeatability and negative research results, and is instead constrained by practicalities and pragmatics. Ingwersen expressed pleasure at the acceptance of web redundancy, citing his theory of polyrepresentation and noting the value of weighting term and search results underlying ranking of web search results. He credited the ASIS&T meetings and publications for developments stemming from original IR experimental studies.