DCMI Virtual: Presentations
Retired, Seattle, US
Stuart Weibel was a co-organizer of the early Dublin Core workshops and conferences. He helped bring a loosely-organized collection of global expertise together to form the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and directed it for the first decade of its existence. The effort began with a conversation at the second World Wide Web conference in Chicago in 1994, lamenting the difficulty of finding web resources. Weibel and Eric Miller offered to organize a workshop to explore models of resource description on the Web. Fifty-two web technologists, librarians, and content specialists gathered in Dublin, Ohio in March of 1995, and thus began the workshop and conference series that we reprise in this online symposium. Weibel worked in Research for 25 years at OCLC, a global library cooperative. He left in 2012 to sail and maintain a traditional 26-foot wooden gaff cutter. That is the varnished truth.
Metadata is an abstraction, a language with a grammar and vocabularies that necessarily emerges in many varied forms across natural languages, cultures, and intellectual domains. This address will recapitulate some of the metaphors that emerged in the community to bridge these abstractions to the problems of information management in the digital world.
Weibel will also explore some of the social engineering challenges of how a growing global community self-organized and, in the current vernacular, “crowd sourced” what grew into a global standards activity, a research community, and many spin-off activities that underlie much of the organization of digital information on the Internet.
There’s a pretty good chance he’ll tell some stories along the way.
USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL), Maryland, US
Erin Antognoli is the lead metadata librarian and data curation team lead in the Knowledge Services Division of the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL) in Beltsville, Maryland. She coordinates the strategy and application of a variety of metadata standards relevant to both United States federal data and agricultural data, including displayed expertise in ISO 19115 for geospatial data, DataCite, and Project Open Data. Antognoli has contributed to the development and improvement of the Ag Data Commons repository and GeoData catalog to promote FAIR data at NAL for over five years. She also serves as co-chair of the CENDI Data Curation Discussion Group, which consists of senior information managers from a variety of United States federal agencies.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Fabrizio Celli received the MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Rome "Roma Tre" in 2009. He also received the BSc in Psychology from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 2015. Currently working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), he has 11 years of experience as a software engineer. His major skills are web application development, search engines, linked open data, big data, machine learning, and IT security. He has interests in Neuroscience and Theoretical Physics.
Institute of Agricultural Information and Economics (AIE), Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (BAAFS)
Xiaojing Qin is the supervisor of knowledge and information management team. She works at the Institute of Agricultural Information and Economics (AIE), Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (BAAFS) in China. She responsible for the construction of agricultural information resources, data sharing, information analysis, and semantic technology research.
Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI
Medha Devare is Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI and leads one of the three Modules of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, spearheading efforts to operationalize the FAIR Principles towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data across CGIAR’s 13 Centers. Prior to this she led the CGIAR System‘s Open Access/Open Data Initiative from the CGIAR System Office in France. Medha is an agronomist and microbial ecologist with experience working on and leading projects addressing food and nutritional security and sustainable resource management in South Asia. She also has experience in data management and semantic web standards and tools.
Team Leader at The Land Portal Foundation
Over the past 16 years, Laura has been specialising in knowledge management for development with an increasing passion for the information ecology and data ecosystem that characterises the land governance sector where she focuses on enhancing land data discoverability and interoperability through open standards and semantic technologies. She holds a master in communication sciences and a master in economics for developments. Since 2011, Laura has been responsible for the overall management, implementation and expansion of the Land Portal.
In a massively distributed environment like Internet, service providers play a critical role to make information findable. While data providers make available excellent information, hubs collect their metadata and give visibility worldwide. However, the metadata that is being produced and exposed is not always uniformly rich, and needs to be optimized. In the case of scientific literature in food and agriculture, there are certain singularities that make it even more complex. From one side, grey literature is critical, while journal articles are not necessarily the only scholarly communication channel that counts. Secondly, while in other sciences English is the pivotal language, in the case of the food and agriculture and due to the diversity of languages being used, it is necessary to consider multilingualism and semantic strategies as a way to increase accessibility to scientific literature. Service providers have taken different approaches to resolve all this, through expanding the coverage of types of documents and considering semantic technologies as a key instrument to enrich metadata. This panel session aims to discuss the challenges that service providers are facing to aggregate content from data providers in food and agricultural sciences. The five panelists will share their experiences from different perspectives:
- Ag Data Commons which is the public, government, scientific research data catalog and repository available to help the agricultural research community share and discover research data funded by the United States Department of Agriculture and meet Federal open access requirements;
- AGRIS at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with more than 12 Million records about publications in up to 90 different languages from 500 data providers;
- Beijing agricultural think tank platform which brings together agricultural policy, the development plan, agricultural related reports, agricultural experts data, and statistical data around the world; and
- GARDIAN, the Global Agricultural Research Data Innovation & Acceleration Network, which is the CGIAR flagship data harvester across all CGIAR Centers and beyond; and
- The Land Portal Library with 60,000 highly enriched resources related to land governance aggregated from a highly specialized sector.
OCLC Research
Yale University Library
Faculty of UT Knoxville
North-Rhine Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz), Cologne, Germany
Adrian (@acka47) has been working at the North-Rhine Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) in Cologne, Germany since 2008. He is responsible for the project management and the RDF data modeling of hbz’s linked open data service lobid. Adrian initiated the establishment of a German-speaking w orking group for OER metadata within the Competence Center for Interoperable Metadata (KIM) of the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI). Currently, he is involved in the development of an OER Search Index (OERSI) where his focus is on ETL processes. In the context of the OERSI project, he initiated the development of an LRMI profile within KIM to be used as OERSI index schema and as a recommendation for OER providers in the German-speaking world.
Learning Tapestry
Steve Midgley is the founder and managing director of Learning Tapestry, an educational innovation company. Previously, he served as Deputy Director of Educational Technology for Arne Duncan at the US Department of Education, advising on education technology, interoperability standards and educational broadband infrastructure. He also served as the Director of Education at the FCC, where he headed the team that developed the Education policy for the National Broadband Plan. Steve is active on the boards of the nonprofit Literacy Lab and the foundation RaiseYou, and is an investor to and on the board of several for-profit organizations as well. Prior to government service, Steve ran the technology consulting firm Mixrun, providing consulting CTO services to organizations including the California Department of Education, Pearson, Amplify, the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and Danny Hillis’ Applied Minds.
MatchMaker Ed Labs
Brandt Redd is CTO for MatchMaker Ed Labs and coordinator of the EdMatrix directory of Learning Standards. He is a recognized authority in Learning Technology Strategy with expertise in personalized learning, competency-based learning, computer-adaptive assessment, and standards. Recently, Redd served as CIO at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and, prior to that, as Senior Technology Officer for Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His experience includes serving as CTO, chief scientist, senior software engineer, DBA, and co-founding two successful software companies. Redd is co-inventor of three patents.
IIIF Technical Coordinator
Glen works as the IIIF Technical Coordinator which is a position funded by an international consortium of institutions created to sustain and develop the IIIF standards. His main roles is to provide assistance with people who are just starting with IIIF and has run many remote and in person workshops around the world. Before working for the IIIF Consortium he spent many years at the National Library of Wales and was involved in making their digitised collections of Maps, Manuscripts, Photographs and Newspapers available through IIIF. He has a keen interest in Linked Data and in particular linked data created through crowdsourcing.
National Library of Finland
Osma Suominen is working as an information systems specialist at the National Library of Finland. He is currently working on automated subject indexing, in particular the Annif tool and the Finto AI service, as well as the publishing of bibliographic data as Linked Data. He is also one of the creators of the Finto.fi thesaurus and ontology service and is leading development of the Skosmos vocabulary browser used in Finto. Osma Suominen earned his doctoral degree at Aalto University while doing research on semantic portals and quality of controlled vocabularies within the FinnONTO series of projects.
Linnaeus University
Koraljka Golub is a Professor in Library and Information Science at Linnaeus University. She is the head of the institute, Linnaeus University’s iSchool and program coordinator for the Master’s in Digital Humanities. Her research focuses on manual, automatic and collaborative approaches to knowledge organization for the purposes of information retrieval. She has worked on research projects related to automatic subject indexing using thesauri and classification schemes, both subject specific (Engineering Index) and general (Dewey Decimal Classification, Library of Congress Subject Headings). Established evaluation models for automated subject indexing as well as their more complex alternatives have also been a focus of her research.
KNAW Huygens Institute for Dutch History
Annemieke Romein is a post-doctoral researcher at the KNAW Huygens Institute for Dutch History. She is an early modern historian, who works on the intersection of political and legal history as well as digital humanities. Her research focuses on early modern legislation from a comparative perspective. Her current project - ‘A Game of Thrones?’ - deals with how governance in three early modern republics (Berne, Holland and Gelderland) dealt with issues of order. In 2019 she was a Researcher-in-Residence at the KB National Library of the Netherlands where she worked with Sara Veldhoen and Michel de Gruijter on automatic metadating of individual laws in early modern volumes of ordinances.
National Library of the Netherlands
Sara Veldhoen works as a research software engineer at the research department of the KB, national library of the Netherlands. She is an active member of a research group that explores possibilities around automated metadata generation to assist the people who catalogue publications, with a focus on subject indexing, using Annif, and author indexing. She is also involved in the KB's Researcher-in-Residence programme, where she works together with external researchers on projects they propose, like that of Annemieke Romein. Sara Veldhoen holds a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Amsterdam, where she studied compositionality of language in neural networks.
In the first part of this presentation, Osma Suominen will introduce the general idea of automated subject indexing using a controlled vocabulary such as a thesaurus or a classification system; and the open source automated subject indexing tool Annif, which integrates several different machine learning algorithms for text classification. By combining multiple approaches, Annif can be adapted to different settings. The tool can be used with any vocabulary; and, with suitable training data, documents in many different languages may be analysed. Annif is both a command line tool and a microservice-style API service which can be integrated with other systems. We will demonstrate how to use Annif to train a model using metadata from an existing bibliographic database and how it can then provide subject suggestions for new, unseen documents.
In the second part of the presentation, Koraljka Golub will discuss the topic of evaluating automated subject indexing systems. There are many challenges in evaluation, for example the lack of gold standards to compare against, the inherently subjective nature of subject indexing, relatively low inter-indexer consistency in typical settings, and dominating out-of-context, laboratory-like evaluation approaches.
In the third part of the presentation, Annemieke Romein and Sara Veldhoen will present a case study of how they have applied Annif in a Digital Humanities research project to categorize early modern legislative texts using a hierarchical subject vocabulary and a pre-trained set.
For practitioners that would like to learn how to use the Annif tool on their own, there is also a follow-up hands-on tutorial. The hands-on tutorial consists of short prerecorded video presentations, written instructions and practical exercises that explain and introduce various aspects of Annif and its use.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Fabrizio Celli received the MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Rome "Roma Tre" in 2009. He also received the BSc in Psychology from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 2015. Currently working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), he has 11 years of experience as a software engineer. His major skills are web application development, search engines, linked open data, big data, machine learning, and IT security. He has interests in Neuroscience and Theoretical Physics.
ZBW
Joachim Neubert works as a scientific software developer at the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. He published the [STW Thesaurus for Economics](https://zbw.eu/stw) and the 20th Century Press Archives as Linked Open Data and developed linked data based web services for economics. He is working on the integration of knowledge organization systems into applications and on mappings between such systems, and is exploring the new potentials of Wikidata as a linking hub for resources on the web.
Shanghai Library
Xia Cuijuan is the senior engineer and researcher of Shanghai Library System and Network Center, team leader of the Digital Humanities projects. Her research focuses on Metadata, Ontology, Knowledge Organization, Linked Data, and Digital Humanities. She published more than 40 papers in Journal of Library Science in China, Journal of Academic Libraries, Library Tribune, Library Journal, Library and Information Science and other academic journals.
National Library of China
Xiaoying Zhou, female, Ph.D., librarian, Digital Resources Integration Team deputy leader of Chinese National Library Digital Resources Department, postdoctoral student of the Chinese National Library Research Institute, research expertise: knowledge organization, data mining, digital resource integration.
Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures, Taiwan
Sophy Shu-Jiun Chen is the Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, and also the Executive Secretary of Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures(ASCDC). She received her M.A. degree in Information Studies from the University of Sheffield, UK in 1997, and Ph.D. degree in Library and Information Science from the National Taiwan University in 2012. Dr. Chen is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Graduate Institute of Library & Information Studies, National Taiwan Normal University. Her research interests include digital libraries, metadata, ontologies, Linked Data, knowledge organization, and digital humanities. She initiated the Research Project of Chinese-language AAT (Art & Architecture Thesaurus) with the Getty Research Institute, USA since 2008, and founded the LODLab@ASCDC since 2018.
Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures, Taiwan
Currently worked as a research assistant in the LODLab at the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures(ASCDC) in Taiwan (ROC) since 2016. His major interests lie in the semantic data model design for data object-related cultural heritage information, pre-processing for LOD-based data conversion, and application of LOD datasets for textual and visual studies enhancing the field of digital humanities research.
The study is based on the results of the “Wooden Slips Character Dictionary” (簡牘字典系統/ WCD), launched by the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures (ASCDC) as an online system to demonstrate the possibility of integrative application of different ontologies and vocabularies to deal with linked data for DH research. To achieve the aforesaid purpose, the study has developed an “integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology.” The main purpose of the ontological design is to support DH scholarship in the research field of ancient Chinese characters and their interpretation, and also serve as a basic data model for structuring an online retrieval system of Chinese characters across different institutes. The integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology is designed based on the CIDOC-CRM model, which contains four different data models of specific fields to enhance the detailed and accurate description of single wooden slips and the information about each written character. The CRM-based data model is extended to enrich the detailed data on each written Chinese character, including temporal information of work production and annotation for the whole wooden slip or a single character. As a result, the CRM classes are extended as nodes to link with the different types of this integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology. Since the ancient Chinese characters are written on fragile materials and easily become damaged or unrecognizable over time, the interpretation process of these characters has to rely on the support both of images and their metadata retrieval through sematic methods, such as IIIF and Linked Data. To read, recognize and compare writing manners between the same or similar written characters is one of the important methods used to interpret characters accurately. IIIF-based retrieval systems can help scholars to conduct research in a visually comfortable way. While interpreting the precise meaning of a written character within the whole text, obtaining information about the composition or annotation of a Chinese ancient glyph must depend on the LOD-based retrieval approach. ASCDC’s “Chinese characters and character realization ontology” and the “Web Annotation on Cultural heritage ontology” might offer a new approach to analyze this Chinese ancient cultural heritage via semantic methods. To extend and enhance the preliminary research results, images of single characters in the WCD system are further interoperated and retrievable in the union catalog of the “Multi-database Search System for Historical Chinese Characters” based on the IIIF-based API, which is established in cooperation with other international research communities, including the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, National Institute of Japanese Language, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, and Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University in Japan. The same Chinese characters from datasets of different institutes can be displayed in this collective interface, which supports the study of ancient Chinese characters. Links:
- Wooden Slips Character Dictionary: https://wcd-ihp.ascdc.sinica.edu.tw/woodslip/
- Multi-database Search System for Historical Chinese Characters: https://wcd-ihp.ascdc.sinica.edu.tw/union/
National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Information Institute of CAAS, China
Professor, the director of the business department of National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Information Institute of CAAS.
He focuses on the research and practice of digital processing of agricultural information resources, multi-source heterogeneous big data fusion, data opening and sharing, as well as thesaurus, ontology, authority file, linked data and knowledge graph. He presided and participated in the National Key Technology Support Program "Construction and Demonstration Application of Knowledge Organization System for Foreign Language Science and Technology Literature Information", "Agricultural Scientific Data Sharing Center" project of Ministry Of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China project "The Construction and Translation Research of Agricultural Ontology", Chinese Academy Of Engineering Knowledge Center construction project, the EU's seventh framework project and FAO international cooperation project, etc. He has won 4 awards for scientific and technological achievements, obtained more than 10 computer software copyright registrations, published more than 50 papers, and published 4 books.
National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Information Institute of CAAS, China
Doctor in Information Management, the member of Knowledge Organization & Intelligent Computing Research Group in Agricultural Information Institute of CAAS. She mainly research on linked data, knowledge graph and semantic analysis.
Europeana
Nuno Freire holds a PhD in Informatics and Computer Engineering from the University of Lisbon. He conducts his research at INESC-ID, and his areas of interest include information systems, data integration, information extraction, data quality, knowledge representation, and information retrieval. His main domain of interest is his cultural heritage, and works jointly with the Europeana R&D, with research interests in novel methods for data aggregation, and in data modelling for the maintenance and evolution of the Europeana Data Model. He has been a member of the Program Committees of major international conferences in the area of digital libraries: JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) and TPDL (Theory and Practice in Digital Libraries), SEMANTiCS and reviewer for the International Journal on Digital Libraries.
Europeana
Antoine Isaac (Europeana Foundation) works as R&D Manager for Europeana. He has been researching and promoting the use of Semantic Web and Linked Data technology in culture since his PhD studies at Paris-Sorbonne and the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. He has especially worked on the representation and interoperability of collections and their vocabularies. He has served in other related W3C efforts, for example on SKOS, Library Linked Data, Data on the Web Best Practices, Data Exchange. He co-chairs the Technical Working Group of the RightsStatements.org initiative and the Discovery Technical Specification Group at the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
Khon Kaen University, Thailand
Wirapong Chansanam is an assistant professor at the Department of Information Science, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Khon Kaen University, Thailand. He has been working as a lecturer for more than 10 years in the field of information technology, information science, digital humanities, and business computing at Chaiyaphum Rajabhat University and Khon Kaen University, Thailand.
Khon Kaen University, Thailand
Kulthida Tuamsuk, dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. She is a founder of the Digital Humanities Research Group and being known as a research who has published several international papers in the fields of digital humanities, digital content management, knowledge organization, and digital archives.
The National Diet Library of Japan
Chief, Standardization Section, Digital Information Distribution Division, Digital Information Department, National Diet Library, Japan
The National Diet Library of Japan
Standardization Section, Digital Information Distribution Division, Digital Information Department, National Diet Library, Japan
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
Ms. Mitchell graduated from Carleton University in 1997 with a B.A. in Geography and has worked in Canada’s vibrant geomatics sector, both in the private and public sectors, for 23 years. A specialization in standardized geographic metadata brought her to Natural Resources Canada in 2001. Ms. Mitchell led a federal government-wide transition to one common geographic metadata (ISO 19115) between 2009 and 2014; following successful implementation, Ms. Mitchell led a multi-departmental team of experts in the creation of what became known as the Harmonized North American Profile of ISO 19115 –adding guidance and best practices to the existing profile to enable consistency and harmony in the whole-of-government implementation of this standard.
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) (on leave)
Marie-Claude Côté is the Manager of Recordkeeping Strategies with the Archives Branch at Library and Archives Canada. In her role, she supports both Government of Canada (GC) institutions and Government archivists on good information management (IM) practices including digital recordkeeping, metadata, and record transfers. She previously held management and analyst positions at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Canadian International Development Agency, and Industry Canada. After obtaining her Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science (MLIS), she worked in public and private sector libraries before joining the federal public service. For the last 23 years, she has contributed to the development of the IM domain in the GC. Marie-Claude also teaches the IM Curriculum at the Canada School of Public Service. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Library
Her career as a Mexican library manager has more than twenty years in a variety of libraries from different sectors such as private, public, national, and international organizations. She is a knowledge management expert; her areas of interest include scientific communication, research networks, and research data management. Ms. Trillo is currently attending a master program about “Intercultural Education between Europe and Latin-American” offered by the UNED in Spain. She earned her MLIS from the Universidad de la Habana, Cuba in 2011. She received a Post-Graduate Degree from the FLACSO Argentina in “Project Management applied to Libraries and Documentation Centers” in 2007. She graduated cum laude from the UNAM with a Bachelor's Degree in Library Science in 2001. Since the beginning of 2019, she works as a SOLO Librarian at CTBTO Preparatory Commission based in Vienna, Austria; in one of the four official headquarters of the United Nations.
RailML
Active in the railway sector for over 20 years and co-founder of the non-profit organization railML.org, dedicated to developing an industry standard of data exchange and prototyping applicative softward for the railway sector. Currently also the owner of the company Bahnkonzept.
railML functions on the principle of referencing existing usable standards instead of developing all aspects from scratch and it can therefore be seen as an application of Dublin Core. Since Dublin Core has its background in library science, it makes this a great example for collaborative open source work and cooperation spanning across ectors, which might otherwise not have much in common.
School of IT, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Hussein's research is situated within the Digital Libraries Laboratoryand the Centre in ICT for Development (ICT4D). His main researchinterests are in digital libraries, ICT4D, African language InformationRetrieval, cultural heritage preservation, Internet technology andeducational technology. He has in the past worked extensively onarchitecture, scalability and interoperability issues related to digitallibrary systems. He has worked closely with international and nationalpartnerships for metadata archiving, including: the Open ArchivesInitiative; Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations; andthe NRF-CHELSA South African National ETD Project. His recent researchhas a growing emphasis on the relationship between low resourceenvironments and such architectures. This has evolved into a focus onsocietal development and its alignment with digital libraries andinformation retrieval. He is currently collaborating with colleagues inarchiving and curation to develop a proof-of-concept low-resourcesoftware toolkit for robust long-term archiving.
Synaptica Knowledge Solutions
Dave Clarke is co-founder and CEO of the Synaptica® group of companies, providers of enterprise software solutions for knowledge organization and discovery. He served on the authoring committee of the 2005 version of the US national standard for controlled vocabularies, ANSI/NISO Z39.19. Dave leads research and development at Synaptica, including software solutions for taxonomy and ontology management, text analytics and auto-categorization, image annotation and indexing, and Linked Data management. He is involved in educational outreach programs including LD4PE, the Linked Data for Professional Education initiative of DCMI. Synaptica software solutions have attracted numerous international awards including: Knowledge Management World magazine’s 100 Companies that Matter in KM and Trend Setting Product of the Year (multiple awards between 2011 and 2017). In 2016 Clarke was awarded the Knowledge Management Leadership Award by the Global Knowledge Management Congress. Dave is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London, and a Leadership Fellow of St. George’s House, Windsor Castle.
National Library of Israel
Ahava Cohen holds a doctorate in RDA from Bar Ilan University, Israel. She serves as head of the Hebrew cataloging department at the National Library of Israel and is a member of the Israeli Inter-University Cataloging Committee. She also teaches cataloging and classification in the David Yellin College MLIS program and heads the national continuing professional development program in cataloging. On the international front, Ahava is chair of the European RDA Interest Group (EURIG) and is the backup European representative to the RDA Steering Committee. Her research interests include multilingual access to library collections and ethics in working with multicultural patrons and resources.
UIUC
Myung-Ja (MJ) K. Han is a Professor and Metadata Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include interoperability of metadata, relationships between collection description and item-level metadata, issues on bibliographic control in the digital library environment, and semantic web and linked data.
Kenya
Humphrey Keah is an information and knowledge management practitioner whose 20 years of research support experience spans the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences. Recently he won the 2020 InforShare award on International Information Issues by the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Humphrey was instrumental in linking African universities and the global iSchools Digital Humanities Curriculum Committee (iDHCC). Currently he is leading knowledge management initiatives at the Centre for Health Literacy and Quality-Kenya (CHLQ-K) while undertaking doctoral research with special interests in semantic web applications for research and cultural heritage institutions. Previously Humphrey worked at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the Library of Congress field office in Nairobi, the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA-Nairobi) and Environment Liaison Centre International (ELCI). Humphrey has teaching experience as Computer Instructor at INTEL College and Assistant Lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya (TUK). He speaks fluent French and has MSc. in IT and BSc. in Information Science from Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya.
Kenya
Jane Wambugu has worked with the Ministry of Agriculture as an Agriculture and Home Economists for 27 years. She has mainstreamed nutrition in departments (Crops, Livestock and Fisheries) as well as forming a link between Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Health through the Agri-Nutrition Linkages Technical Working Group. This link has enabled the two ministries to jointly work together on nutrition interventions. As head of unit, Jane brought several partners together, held three (3) Agri-Nutrition Regional and National Conferences and supported the development of several documents that link Agriculture and Nutrition. In response to Covid -19 pandemic she coordinated development of national guidelines and 1 million Kitchen garden initiative for all the 47 counties. Jane Holds a Bachelor degree in Agriculture and Home Economics from Egerton University and a Masters in Management of Development Specializing in Training, Rural Extension and Training from Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
Kenya
George Nyairo Obanyi holds master’s degree in communication, Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from the University of Nairobi and a Bachelor of Education from Kenyatta University. Mr. Obanyi has been involved in communications for development organizations and projects for the past 20 years. He has been involved in designing, implementing and evaluating strategic communication programs across several sectors. He has facilitated knowledge management projects and communication training workshops. Currently, he is Senior Technical Officer for Communication at FHI 360, an international development agency, where he provided communication support for the Kenya country office and projects. He is also the Chairman of the Association for Development Communication Practitioners in Kenya (AFDECOP). Mr. Obanyi has worked for the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), World Agroforestry Centre, International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), Nation Media Group and The Standard Newspapers. Mr. Obanyi has also attended short courses on project management, policy communication, participatory communication approaches, social media for global health, ICT for development, social and behavior change communication.
George Mason University
Trevor Watkins is the Teaching and Outreach Librarian at George Mason University and is the Technical Lead and Chair of the Web Committee of Project STAND. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, STEM Librarianship, information literacy integration models, open knowledge diffusion tools, and teaching and learning theories in non-traditional spaces. Mr. Watkins holds a MS in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management and a MS in Library Information Science from Kent State University, and a MS in Computing and Information Systems from Youngstown State University. Mr. Watkins has been the recipient of multiple NSF Scholarships, and has authored and co-authored a book, published papers and presentations at conferences. Some of his current projects are Black Squirrel GNU/Linux operating system, Cosmology of Artificial Intelligence, and Tami II.
University of Maryland
Lae’l Hughes-Watkins is the University Archivist for the University of Maryland She is the Founder of Project STAND, and her research areas focus on outreach to marginalized communities, documenting student activism within disenfranchised populations, and utilizing narratives of oppressed voices within the curricula of post-secondary education spaces. Her most recent publication is "Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices," Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 5 , Article 6. She is also a 2019 Mover and Shaker, serves on SAA’s Nominating Committee 2019-2020, ARL LCDP 2018-2019, a recipient of SOA Merit Award for 2018.
Princeton University
Valencia L. Johnson is the Project Archivist for Student Life at Princeton University. She engages with student organizations on managing and preserving their records, in analog and born-digital formats. As the creator of Amp Up Your Archives, she works to create programs to inspire students to view their records and materials as important documentation that is an equal to the administrative record of the university.
ASU
Shannon Walker is the University Archivist at ASU. For the last seven years Shannon has overseen the archival collections at Thunderbird School of Global Management, the last two years splitting her time between the Glendale campus and Archives & Special Collections in the Hayden Library. Prior to Thunderbird she had stints in the Western History & Genealogy Department at the Denver Public Library and at the Getty Conservation Institute library in Los Angeles. Her background is working with photograph and print archives, in academic, public and museum libraries. Her professional interests are in digitization, interpretation, and access to collections. She received her MLIS from the University of Denver, with a concentration in Archives. She is a member of the Arizona State Historical Records Advisory Board (AHRAB) and has actively served on the Arizona Archives Summit planning committee
Wright State University
Chris Wydman is the University Archivist and Records Manager in the Department of Special Collections & Archives at Wright State University. Chris has worked in the department since 2005, where he leads the university records management program and is charged with the management of the university’s historical archives. Chris is a strong advocate of public history and community archiving initiatives, and has participated in numerous outreach projects with the communities of Southwest Ohio and beyond. Chris serves as a faculty adjunct in the Department of History where he teaches several courses for the Public History M.A. program, including Introduction to Archives and Manuscripts, Public History Field Study, and Information Management. Chris holds a B.A. in history and a M.A. in public history, both from Wright State University.