Vinod Chachra VTLS Inc., USA

Vinod Chachra, Chairman of the Board and CEO of VTLS Inc., is an internationally recognized lecturer and consultant in the field of information system planning. His 20-year career represents a productive mix of academic and business pursuits. After earning his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research at Virginia Tech, Dr Chachra served that university in many capacities, most recently as vice president for computing and information systems. In 1985 he founded VTLS Inc., which provides state-of-the-art library automation systems to more than 900 libraries worldwide. VTLS Inc. is based in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, and has offices in six countries and does business in 35 countries.

Daniel Clancy Google, USA

Daniel Clancy, PhD, is currently the Engineer Director for Google Print. The Google Print project is focused on indexing off-line printed content to make it full text searchable via the web. Prior to coming to Google, Dr. Clancy worked at NASA Ames Research Center for 7 years. Prior to leaving, he was the Director of the Information Sciences and Technology Directorate at NASA Ames research center. Dr. Clancy received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Texas at Austin.

Willard McCarty King's College London, UK

Willard McCarty (www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm) is Reader in Humanities Computing at King's College London. Trained in the United States as an undergraduate in physics, German and English at the University of California and at Reed College, he took his PhD in Milton studies at Toronto (Canada) and then went on to a research career in classics and in the emerging field of humanities computing. He is founding editor of the electronic seminar Humanist (1987--). He has lectured and published widely in Europe, North America and Australia. His recent book, Humanities Computing (Palgrave, 2005), examines the intellectual foundations and potential directions of the field from the perspective of the individual scholar.

Sandy Payette Cornell University, USA

Sandy Payette leads digital library research and development projects at Cornell University’s Information Science program. She is founder and co-director of the internationally-recognized Fedora Project that deploys sophisticated open-source software that forms the basis of digital libraries, institutional repositories, digital archives, and educational software. She is currently collaborating with colleagues from Cornell and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the NSF-funded Pathways project to design new information architectures for integrating heterogeneous digital repositories and services, and to demonstrate a next-generation scholarly communication system. Sandy’s other research areas include digital preservation, information networks, and automated policy enforcement.

Dr. Britta Woldering Die Deutsche Bibliothek (German National Library), GERMANY

Britta Woldering is assistant for international relations to the director general of the German National Library. She is involved in different international projects, e.g. The European Library, TEL- ME-MOR and MACS (Multilingual access to subjects), and will take over the secretariat of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) from October 2005. Furthermore, she is one of the editors of the renowned German librarian’s journal Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie (ZfBB).