Keynote Speakers

Monday, June 20

Maria Zemankova, National Science Foundation (NSF)
"Future Digital Libraries: Research and Responsibilities"

In October 1991, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a workshop to examine the role of the Information Retrieval research community in the emerging environment of Internet, high performance text processing capabilities and ever-increasing volumes of digitized documents. Ed Fox, Michael Lesk and Michael McGill drafted a White Paper, calling for a National Electronic Science, Engineering, and Technology Library. The term “Digital Library” was adopted and for follow-up workshops with the goal to identify research directions, leading to National Science Foundation (NSF)/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research in Digital Libraries Initiative announced in late 1993. Now, in 2016, 25 years after the first workshop, 15 years after the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries has been established, and many initiatives and developments around the world, what is the state of Digital Libraries? What items should be in digital libraries, who should their custodians, how can the items be organized to support knowledge discovery, how can the contents be safeguarded and preserved? Ebla, Syria (2500 B.C. - 2250 B.C.) constitutes the oldest organized library of tables yet discovered. What will the archeologists discover in year 4400 about the world, politics, economies, technologies, science, climate, species, health, food, culture, art, entertainment and everyday life through the ages? 

The talk will examine what we can do to support innovative research and design and implementation of lasting, informative Digital Libraries that will promote global goals of knowledge discovery and international understanding and personal needs to organize and selectively share important facts, creations, and memories.



Maria Zemankova joined the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) Division in 1988. She has been instrumental in developing initiatives on Scientific Databases, Digital Libraries, and Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics, and has been active in cross-disciplinary initiatives, including Information Technology Research, Wireless Information Systems, Science of Design, Cyber Trust, Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation, Research Infrastructure, EarthCube, Smart & Connected Health, Big Data, and Visual & Experiential Computing. Her research interests include intelligent information systems; information/knowledge organization and evolution, management of uncertainty (fuzzy logic), knowledge discovery environments, data mining, privacy/security, visualization, information retrieval, text mining, social media, multimedia systems, spatio-temporal systems (GIS), scientific databases and data-knowledge life cycle. 


Tuesday, June 21

Rachel Frick, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
"The State of Practice and Use of Digital Collections: the Digital Public Library of America as a platform for research"

In 2016, Digital Public Library of America is celebrating the third year of its cultural heritage metadata aggregator service. Since its launch, the DPLA collection has grown to represent over 13 million objects and over 1900 institutions, from small historical societies to large research libraries. With onramps, or hubs, in over 20 states, DPLA is well on its way to complete the coverage map by the end of 2017. As it continues to build this amazing dataset, DPLA is taking the time to examine what lessons are to be learned from this unprecedented resource, as the organization’s sustainability is directly tied to how the collection grows, how to measures use, and proving its value to the communities it serves.  What does this collection data tell us about the state of bibliographic holdings information, and the knowledge and skills and abilities of those who create records, not just for local use, but for use in other environments and contexts? How well does the metadata perform when it leaves its original context? Working with our colleagues at Europeana, we have begun investigating and addressing the problematic issues regarding access and reuse of digital objects in the collective by examining current ways rights are expressed in the metadata, working towards standardization of this information. Ms. Frick will discuss DPLA’s rights work, as well as other potential areas of research and DPLA’s strategy for future growth.

Rachel Frick is the Director of Business Development for the Digital Public Library of America. In this role, she is responsible for building out DPLA’s sustainability plan and forging extensive new relationships in order to strengthen DPLA’s visibility and impact. Prior to DPLA, Ms. Frick served as the director of the Digital Library Federation program at the Council on Library and Information Resources, building a large and diverse community of practitioners who advance research, teaching and learning through the application of digital library research, technology and services. She has held senior positions at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the University of Richmond, among other roles. She is widely known in the library, archive, and museum world for her vision, organizational know-how and commitment to open culture. She graduated with her MSLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Wednesday, June 22

Stephen Bury, New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)
"The Energy of Delusion: The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) & The Digital"

Museum libraries came late to the digitization party - primarily because of perceived copyright issues. Since 2010 the three libraries of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) have embarked on a series of niche, boutique digitization projects, pushing the boundaries of fair use, but they have also embraced the born-digital, establishing a program to capture art-history-rich websites and to give access to them via an innovative use of a discovery layer which prioritizes web resources in the
ranking of results.

Since 2010 Stephen Bury has been the Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library and a Director of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC). Previously he was the Head of European and American Collections at the British Library, where he was also in charge of its Web Archiving program, its contribution to Europeana, and the 21st Century Curator Project. 
He has a first-class honours degree in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Literature and Art History from the University of London. Publications include Artists’ Books (1995, 2015), Artists’ Multiples (2001), and Breaking the Rules (2007): he was the first advisory editor of the online Benezit’s Dictionary of Artists (2010-14).