Survive or Thrive 2010 - Making the most of your digital content

Bill Thompson

is a well-known technology critic and commentator on digital culture. A pioneer of new media in the UK, Bill was Internet ambassador for PIPEX in the early 1990s and founded The Guardian’s New Media Lab in 1995, setting up and editing the first Guardian website.

He has worked as a freelance journalist, author, public speaker, web developer, consultant and policy advisor. He has a widely read weekly column, Billboard, on the BBC News website, and appears regularly as a studio expert on the BBC World Service’s ‘Digital Planet’.

Daniel Greenstein

has been known as a librarian, library administrator, and a prominent figure in American and international library associations. He is currently Vice Provost for Academic Planning, Programs and Coordination at the University of California. He plays a leading role in providing strategic thinking for systemwide academic planning and initiatives at the University, including oversight of the UC digital library, publishing, and broadcast services, and prior restructuring efforts at the central UC administrative office.

Before becoming Vice Provost, Greenstein was University Librarian for the California Digital Library (CDL) and systemwide library planning (there are about 100 libraries spread across the 10 campuses in the UC library system).

Andy Neale

is the Programme Manager for DigitalNZ, an initiative from the National Library of New Zealand helping people to find share and use NZ digital content. He was also the founding technical lead for DigitalNZ where, in 2008, he established its content aggregation and data sharing services.

He was previously the Web Manager at the National Library of NZ, and prior to that a member of the PricewaterhouseCooper Global Web Team based in London. His current passion is helping to get rich NZ content into schools.

Mike Ellis

works for Eduserv who are a not for profit IT services group as a Solutions Architect working with clients (both internal and external) with the web, forming rough ideas into workable and user-accessible end-results.

Before working for Eduserv, he was Head of Web for the National Museum of Science and Industry, UK, which comprises the Science Museum in London, Media Museum in Bradford and Railway Museum in York.

He also writes at his Electronic Museum blog, has been commissioned to write a unit for the new Digital Heritage course at Leicester University, and is about to write a book about the web and cultural institutions.

Dr Liz Lyon

is the Director of UKOLN at the University of Bath UK, where she leads work to promote synergies between digital libraries and open science environments. She is Associate Director of the UK Digital Curation Centre, in which UKOLN is a partner. She is also author of a number of direction-setting Reports including Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential (2009), Scaling Up (2008) and Dealing with Data (2007).

Liz serves on a number of strategic boards including representation for the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council and the US National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyber Infrastructure.

Although Dr Lyon has previously worked in various University libraries in the UK, her background was originally in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry.

James Reid

is Business Development Manager for EDINA with over 10 years experience in the area of Geographic Information. He was a founding member of the Association for Geographic Information (Northern Ireland Chapter) when working in the public sector GI arena.

In addition to extensive management experience in public sector authorities (N. Ireland & Scotland) he has particular relevant experience in developing the UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure and acts as technical advisor to a wide a range of GI project and service developments for UK academia. He is also the Service Manager for the EDINA ‘UKBORDERS’ online national service.

Tom Heath

is Lead Researcher at Talis Systems Ltd, a global leader in the research, development and commercial exploitation of Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies. At Talis, he is responsible for leading internal research exploring how Linked Data affects the sharing and reuse of data, the value and insights that can be derived from this data, and the implications of these changes for human-computer interaction. Tom has a BSc in Psychology from The University of Liverpool and a PhD in Computer Science from The Open University. He has been the recipient of a number of awards in the Semantic Web field, including First Prize in the 2007 International Semantic Web Challenge and 2008/9 STI International PhD of the Year..

Prof. Sophia Ananiadou

is director of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and Professor in the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester. Her expertise is in text mining tools and services, some  currently used in NaCTeM. Her past and current work on repositories and semantic metadata includes UKPubMedCentral, ASSERT, ASSIST, CheTa, FixRep, GoldDust, and INTUTE .  She was recipient for 3 consecutive years (2006, 2007, 2008) of the IBM UIMA innovation award for her leading work on the interoperability of text-mining tools, leading to the text mining infrastructure U-Compare.

Chris Lintott

is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and a junior research fellow at Somerville College. He is also principal investigator for the Galaxy Zoo project.

Chris is also strongly involved in what is slightly oddly known as popular science, most famililarly as co-presenter on the really nearly-fifty-year-old Sky at Night program alongside Sir Patrick Moore, and most recently as coauthor of Bang!, with Patrick and Dr Brian May. The book was included on the longlist for the 2007 Royal Society Book Prize. He also has a regular column (on observing the night sky) in The Times.

David Kay

specialises in programme strategy, design and management with wide experience in education and skills and in the creative and digital industries.

He holds a Masters in History from the University of Cambridge and a PGCE from the University of Durham. His background includes three years as a teacher in one of the UK’s leading schools before joining the IT industry in 1980 to specialise in vertical market applications for education and information management. After a series of director level roles, latterly in e-Learning, he co-founded Sero in June 2004 to focus on economic and skills development based on ICT and digital media.

Jo Pugh

is a member of the Education and Outreach team at The National Archives working on the department’s award winning website formerly known as Learning Curve. (Now it’s more of a TWAIN). He has worked at a number of museums and galleries including the National Portrait Gallery and the Petrie Collection and for BBC History.

In addition to running The National Archives’ Flickr presence he also manages a project to tweet 1940 in real time using British Cabinet Papers. Other research interests at the Archives have included 1950s horror comics, pre-war fiction films and how to win a duel.

Paul Miller

offers analysis and consultancy at the interface between the enterprise and the web with a particular focus on the Semantic Web, Linked Data and Cloud Computing .

Most recently, Paul was Technology Evangelist at UK technology company, Talis. Prior to joining Talis in 2005 he held the post of Director at the Common Information Environment, a consortium of UK public sector organisations including the BBC, the British Library, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the National Health Service (NHS).

Rachel Bruce

is responsible for JISC’s Information Environment strategy and the innovation programmes that support this. These include digital preservation, repositories, resources discovery and portals and shared infrastructure services.

Catherine Grout

is responsible for directing JISC programmes and projects in the e-content area. This portfolio of activities includes:

The JISC Digitisation Programme3, the Strategic Content Alliance4 and other allied activities to stimulate communication and activity with commercial publishers and e-content providers (including the JISC-Publishers Metadata Programme). I manage the work of the JISC e-content team who work to deliver a co-ordinated e-content strategy for the JISC Community, including working closely with JISC Collections and other JISC Services and partners both within and outside the UK.