BREAKING BOUNDARIES: INTEGRATION & INTEROPERABILITY
   

 
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12th BIENNIAL CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION
3 - 5 February, 2004
Melbourne Convention Centre

 
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
 
The VALA2004 keynote speakers, drawn from the USA, France and China, were selected for their expertise and work with major projects of significant interest and their understanding of current key issues. Together with an impressive range of local and overseas speakers reporting on innovative projects and topics of current importance, they will ensure that the conference provides a wide vision of emerging developments in libraries on both the local and world stage.
 
Hal Abelson

Hal Abelson is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  He is winner of several teaching awards, including the IEEE's Booth Education Award, cited for his contributions to the teaching of undergraduate computer science.  Abelson's research at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory focuses on 'amorphous computing', an effort to create programming technologies that can harness the power of the new computing substrates emerging from advances in microfabrication and molecular biology.  He is also engaged in the interaction of law, policy, and technology as they relate to societal tensions sparked by the growth of the Internet, and he is active in projects at MIT and elsewhere to help bolster our intellectual commons.. Abelson is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation and of Creative Commons. He also serves as consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. At MIT, Abelson is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology and co-head of MIT's Council on Educational Technology. He is also active in MIT's OpenCourseWare and DSpace (institutional digital archiving) initiatives.

 
Lorcan Dempsey

Lorcan Dempsey is Vice President, Research, at OCLC. He participates in the Strategic Leadership Team of OCLC and oversees the work of OCLC Research, a major library research and development unit. Before coming to OCLC Lorcan worked for the JISC in the UK, where he oversaw several national programmes, and at UKOLN, a national research and policy unit. He was the founding co-director of the Resource Discovery Network.

 
Catherine Lupovici

Catherine Lupovici is Head of the Digital Library Department, Direction des Services et des Résaux, Bibliothèque Nationale De France. This department covers digitisation services, the Gallica online digital library, the Internet/Intranet co-ordination services and the pilot projects for long term preservation of digital collections and web archiving.

 
MacKenzie Smith

Mackenzie Smith is the Associate Director for Technology at the MIT Libraries, where she oversees the Libraries' use of technology and its digital library research program.  She is currently acting as the project director for DSpace, MIT's collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Labs to develop an open source Institutional Repository for scholarly research material in digital formats. She was formerly the Digital Library Program Manager in the Harvard University Library's Office for Information Systems, where she managed the design and implementation of the Library Digital Initiative, and also held positions in the library IT departments at Harvard and the University of Chicago.  Her background and research interests are in applied technology in libraries and academia, and digital libraries in particular.

 
Herbert Van De Sompel

Herbert Van de Sompel graduated in mathematics and computer science at Ghent University and, in 2000, obtained a PhD there for his research on dynamic and context-sensitive reference linking, now commonly known as the OpenURL framework.  From 1982 to 1998 he worked as Head of Library Automation at Ghent University.  In 1999, Herbert spent six months at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory working on reference linking problems and preprint related matters.  While at Los Alamos, Herbert started the Open Archive Initiative with Paul Ginsparg and Rick Luce.  During the academic year 2000/2001, Herbert was visiting fellow in Computer Science at Cornell University, working in the Digital Library Group, and teaching Computing Methods for Digital Libraries.  Afterwards, he was Director of e-Strategy and programmes at the British Library.  Now he is back at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, doing Digital Library research and prototyping.  With Carl Lagoze, Herbert forms the Executive of the Open Archives Initiative, responsible for the publication of of the Santa Fe Convention (2000) and Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (2001 & 2002).  The OpenURL is the subject of a NISO standardization process, and Herbert serves on the NISO Committee charged with taking on that effort.

 
Wu Jianzhong

Dr. Wu Jianzhong is Director of the Shanghai Library and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai (ISTIS, merged in 1995). He serves on the IFLA Governing Board (2001-2005) and as editorial member of Libri, Library Management and Lifelong Education and Library (Japan). Being multilingual, Dr. Wu communicates readily with other professionals in three languages: English, Japanese and Chinese, and has given many lectures at professional conferences in China and abroad. He has published 8 books and over 100 papers on various topics.

 



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Last updated 8 February 2004