1. Clara M. Chu, UCLA  

Multicultural & Globalized Digital Libraries: Digitizing & Empowering the “Other”
The multicultural nature of many of our societies in a globalized reality presents us with the opportunity to engage and advance new frontiers in digital libraries. Focusing on the cultural diversity of the Asian region, this paper will examine what content areas and objects should be digitized, who should be involved in the digitization efforts, and what access issues need to be considered. More specifically, documenting the experiences of the Asian diaspora and ethnic minorities in Asia will be discussed, engaging a framework of multiple identities, representations and positions, such as Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” and Edward Said’s notion of “imagined geographies.” By problematizing the cultural production of digital libraries as an act of nostalgia, of inclusion and exclusion, and of racial and social and sexual differentiation, we can unpack the role digital libraries can play in the creation of communities in our imaginary and in the perception of space and place from those objects we select to digitize. The paper concludes with a call for digitizing the “Other” as an act of empowerment and representation.

Biography:
Dr. Clara M. Chu, an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Studies, UCLA, specializes in the social construction of information systems, institutions, and access in order to understand the usage of and barriers to information in multicultural communities. Her other interests include Research Methodology, Crosscultural Communication, Education for Multicultural Library and Information Science, and International and Comparative Information Services. She has held Visiting Professor/Researcher positions at the University of Puerto Rico (Summer 2004) and University of Valencia (2005-06). She was recipient of the 2002 ALA Equality Award and was selected a 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, which recognizes people who are shaping the future of libraries. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA510775.html?display=LJMS&pubdate=3%2F15%2F2005

Contact:
Clara M. Chu, Associate Professor
UCLA Department of Information Studies
210 GSE&IS Building, Box 951520
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520
Tel.: (310) 206-9368, fax: (310) 206-4460
E-mail: cchu@ucla.edu
Website: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/chu

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2. Kristine Hanna, Internet Archives

Digital Archiving: Making it Happen
This presentation discusses the significance of web archiving, the challenges libraries, archives and memory institutions face in the digital age, as well as some of tools and best practices currently in use to create a successful web archiving strategy.

Biography:
Kristine Hanna is the Director for Web Archiving Services, working with partners to develop web archiving services and solutions that will help preserve the internet. She is particularly passionate about saving "at risk" websites and collections. Kristine has been working on the internet since 1997 when she co-founded GirlGeeks, a career site for women in technology, which was flipped to a non profit in 2002. Before joining the Archive in January of 2006, she held senior level and management positions in online content and business development in media and educational internet companies.Before founding GirlGeeks, Kristine worked extensively in film and television at Lucasfilm, (Colossal) Pictures, and Lorimar/Warner Brothers; and attended USC's School of Cinema and Television. She has earned two team Emmy Awards, as well as two individual Emmy nominations as the Visual Effects Producer on "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles".

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3. Gordon Mohr, Internet Archives

Archival Tools to Match the Web: Open, International, Comprehensive
Together with a number of national libraries, the Internet Archive committed itself in 2003 to international collaboration to create open source tools and standardized formats for web archiving. This project was motivated by our experience as home to over 100 billion archived web resources dating back to 1996, and as a partner to memory institutions building thematic web archives. Resulting tools include the Heritrix archival web crawler/harvester, the Wayback archive browsing service, and the NutchWAX archive full-text index and query utilities. A standard ingest/archival format for web resources called WARC has also been developed. Software with full source code is free to download and reuse, and organizations worldwide have adopted and contributed to these tools. Working with large collections remains a challenge, and the web itself is constantly growing and changing, so we continue to seek international cooperation to expand and improve this web archive tool set.

Biography:
Gordon Mohr is the Chief Technologist of Web Group in Internet Archives.  He has been creating innovative applications for the Internet since 1995. Before joining the Internet Archive, Gordon founded and led Bitzi, a collaborative universal media catalog built by volunteers over the web. Previously, Gordon led the design and implementation of "Ding," an extensible all-Java peer-to-peer instant-messaging platform, for Activerse, an Austin-based startup acquired by CMGi in 1999. In 1995, Gordon helped create VisualWave, an early object-oriented web application server and development environment, for Sunnyvale-based ParcPlace Systems.

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4. Bjørn Olstad, FAST

From Content Organization to User Empowerment
If the network has become the computer, search is in the process of becoming its interface. This transformation impacts the design of future digital libraries. On the content side, innovations in contextual search are driving a new precision level compared to existing search paradigms inherited from the web.  On the user side, search will have an equally profound impact. Closed loop designs connecting social computing and search is transforming libraries from a static repository to a dynamic learning and collaboration space.

Biography:
Dr Bjørn Olstad serves as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Before joining the Company, Dr. Olstad held key positions within General Electric Medical Systems, including Director of Research and Development for Cardiac Ultrasound. He has served as a professor in computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he was awarded the youngest professorship ever.

 

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5. Maristella Agosti, University of Padova

Information Access through Digital Library Systems
The talk presents an interpretation of the evolution of the events and trends in the information access area. Focusing mainly on the last twenty years, particular attention is payed to the digital library system which needs to be envisaged and designed to support the end user in accessing relevant and interesting documents.

Biography:
 Maristella Agosti is Professor of Computer Science, of the Department of Information Engineering (DEI) and Faculty of Humanities, University of Padova, Italy. She is the group leader of the Information Management Systems (IMS) Research Group of the Department which deals with database systems, digital libraries, and information retrieval research. Her research areas of interest are digital library and archive management systems, innovative services for digital library and archive management systems, search engines, Web information retrieval, and evaluation of interactive retrieval systems. She has published more than 100 refereed articles on journals and conference proceedings, and authored or co-authored books and journal issues on hypertext and information retrieval, database design, and automatic construction of hypertexts. She has been involved in several national and international research projects.

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6. Olaf D. Janssen, The European Library

How to Prepare a European Digital Library
This presentation shows how the joint efforts of the national libraries of Europe over the past 20 years have paved the way for the creation of a European Digital Library; currently a collaborative platform for European museums, archives and libraries, but in future also a web service for end-users to discover Europe’s heritage on an unprecedented scale. This presentation sets out the recipe for the first construction phase (2007-2008) and discusses the ingredients that are needed to build an operational European Digital Library from 2009 onwards.

Biography:
Olaf D. Janssen (Netherlands 1973) is project manager for <i>The European Library</i> (www.theeuropeanlibrary.org), the  collaborative platform & joint webservice of national libraries of Europe. He is the hub between the 47 participating libraries and the European Library Office, the day-to-day management team for The European Library. He's also managing a number of European Union funded satellite projects to expand, enhance and improve The European Library platform. His previous position was at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Royal Library of The Netherlands, where he was editor-in-chief for <i>Gabriel</i>, the precursor of The European Library. Olaf has given presentations & lectures across Europe, Asia and the US. Before moving into the library world, he studied astronomy at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Classical men's shoes, cycling, cooking and mountaineering are his life-long passions.

Olaf can be reached at olaf.janssen@theeuropeanlibrary.org
 

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7. Ian H. Witten, University of Waikato - Tutorial Speaker

Tutorial Topic: Introduction to Greenstone Digital Library Software

Ian H. Witten is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where he directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including several books, the most recent being Managing Gigabytes (1999), How to build a digital library (2003), Data Mining (2005) and Web Dragons (2007), all from Morgan Kaufmann. He received an MA in mathematics from Cambridge Unversity, England; an MSc in computer science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the 2004 IFIP Namur Award, a biennial honour accorded for “outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information and communication technology” and the 2005 SIGKDD Service Award for “an outstanding contribution to the data mining field” and in 2006 the Royal Society of New Zealand Hector Medal for “an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the mathematical and information sciences.”

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8. Edward Fox, Virginia Tech - Tutorial Speaker

Tutorial Topic: Introduction to (Teaching / Learning about) Digital Libraries

Edward Fox holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell, and a B.S. from M.I.T. Since 1983 he has been at Virginia Tech, where he serves as Professor. He directs VT’s Digital Library Research Laboratory and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. He is chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, and is on the steering committee for JCDL and ICADL. He has been (co) PI on over 90 research and development projects. In addition to his courses at Virginia Tech (including on digital libraries), Dr. Fox has taught over 65 tutorials in more than 24 countries. He has given over 55 keynote/banquet/international invited/distinguished speaker presentations, 125 refereed conference/workshop papers, and 290 additional papers/presentations. He has co-authored/edited 13 books, 82 journal/magazine articles, 36 book chapters, and many reports. Fox is editor for the Morgan Kaufmann series on Multimedia Information and Systems, was Co-Editor-in-Chief for ACM JERIC, and is on the boards of IJDL, IP&M, JEMH, JOCCH, J. UCS, Multimedia Tools and Applications, TOIS, etc.

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9. Peter Jacso, University of Hawaii - Tutorial Speaker

Tutorial Topic: Open Access Scholarly Databases

Dr. Peter Jacso is a professor at the Library and Information Science Program of the Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii.

For his course development work he received the Pratt-Severn Faculty Innovation Award in Library and Information Studies from the Association of Library and Information Science Educators. For his teaching he received the Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award of the American Society for Information Science & Technology and the Institute for Scientific Information. 

His research area includes such topics as citation analysis and the impact factor of scholarly journals, database quality, information retrieval software, open access databases, content and software evaluation of scholarly digital archives and digital reference sources. He has published several books, and conference papers, and wrote over 500 papers and reviews in research publications such as the Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, Current Science, Cortex, Library Software Review, Library & Information Science Research, and in his regular columns and editorials in Online, Database, Online Information Review, Computers in Libraries, Information Today,  as well as in his Web-born review columns hosted by the Gale Group.

For his writings he received the Louis Shores-Oryx Press Award for excellence in the reviewing of databases from the American Library Association Reference & User Services Association, the Excellence in Writing Award of UMI, and the Electronic Library Best Paper of the Year Award of Learned Information Ltd. and GEAC.

In the past few months  he completed a series of tutorials about open access scholarly databases in Manila and Bangkok, another series of tutorials about citation-enhanced databases in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and was an invited speaker at the annual meeting of the UK Serials Group in Warwick.  He was the keynote speaker in January at a pre-ALA Midwinter lunch hosted by ProQuest about the synergy of metasearching and clustering. He was the keynote speaker at the INFORUM 2007 conference in May talking about the future of professional online information services, and he resumed  his traveling tutorials series about citation-enhanced databases in Taipei, Tainan, New Delhi,  Hyderabad, and Bangalore. For further information see  http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/