Brendan Tuohy is Secretary General of the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources (
www.dcmnr.gov.ie) having been appointed in June 2002 on the establishment of the Department. The Department is responsible for a number of sectors of the economy including telecommunications, broadcasting, postal, ecommerce, marine, fisheries, aquaculture, exploration, mining, energy and renewable resources. Brendan was previously Secretary General of the Department of Public Enterprise and prior to that was Assistant Secretary in that Department and its predecessor, the Department of Transport, Energy and Communications. He currently serves as a member of the National Economic and Social Council (
www.nesc.ie), is Chairman of the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (
www.gesci.org)and was formerly Vice Chairman of the United Nations Task Force on Information and Communications Technology for Development (
www.unicttaskforce.org) He holds a degree in civil engineering from University College Cork and post-graduate qualifications in environmental engineering and management from the University of Dublin, Trinity College.
Prof. Jim Browne is Registrar and Deputy President of the National University of Ireland, Galway. A former Dean of Engineering in Galway, he has many years experience of working in research and development, including extensive experience of European Union and industrially funded projects. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in engineering from NUI, Galway and the PhD and DSc degrees from the University of Manchester. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), the Irish Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland.
Academic Services & Institutional Change
(Thursday 8th March 2:30pm)
This presentation considers the background to the reorganisation of academic units and associated services in Irish Universities. It argues that restructuring is necessary to allow the University to respond to the legitimate demands of stakeholders, including students , research funding agencies and society in general. While the reorganisation has been ‘research led’ in that recent growth in research activity in Universities has exposed the fragility of existing structures, changes taking place in undergraduate offerings and in the demands made by undergraduate students are also driving change. Organisations based on relatively small discipline based academic units have difficulty responding to the needs of students for multidisciplinary programmes and research funding agencies for theme as distinct from discipline based research.
Academic services are also challenged. New teaching and learning support services, which ensure that the old ‘model’ of ‘professional researcher / amateur teacher’ is consigned to history and that students are encouraged to ‘learn’ rather than ‘be taught’, must be created. Existing services, such as Library Services and ‘Computer Services need to constantly reinvent themselves to ensure that they meet the demands of a more diverse and demanding student body.
These issues are considered in the context of recent developments in NUI Galway.
Jan-Martin Lowendahl, Ph. D (Chemistry) is a research director in Gartner Research, where his research area is higher-education technology strategies including administrative and academic systems, learning technologies, identity and access management, governance as well as European higher education issues such as the Bologna Process.Prior to joining Gartner, Dr. Lowendahl had 15 years of experience in higher education, including research and teaching and IT management. Most recently he served as CIO, where his main focus was infrastructure strategies and governance. Dr. Lowendahl has also worked collaboratively in the academic community and has served on several Boards.
Personal Productivity & Organisational Efficiency
(Friday 9
th March 9:15am)
Information technology holds true potential in helping universities achieve academic excellence and value to our society. There are even several areas of research and ways of education that would not be possible today without IT. However, as we become more and more dependent on IT in all its forms, there is a conflict emerging in the intersection of “Organizational Efficiency and Personal Productivity”. Is the standardization stemming from organizational efficiency compatible with the inherent need for flexibility in student, teachers and researchers strive for personal productivity? This presentation will take a look at these issues, while investigating what might constitute a high performance workplace today and in the future.
Arvind Desikan is Product Marketing Manager for Europe for Google's video, book-search and AdSense products and is responsible for product launches related to these products in Europe. He has worked in the technology industry for about eight years, in both marketing and product management roles. Desikan holds an MBA degree from INSEAD, and prior degrees in engineering.
Google Book Search
(Friday 9
th March 11:45am)
Arvind will give an overview of the book search programme and how Google works with libraries, educators, and librarians. His talk will highlight a few Google tools particularly popular with librarians, including Google Book Search and Google Scholar.
Richard E. Luce is the Vice-Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University. He manages the Main (Robert W. Woodruff) Library -- including specialist libraries in Business, Chemistry, Music and Media, and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library (MARBL) -- and coordinating university-wide library policy with the directors of the Health, Law, Theology, and Oxford College Libraries.
Prior to joining Emory, Mr. Luce was the Research Library director at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1991-2006). Known as an information technology pioneer and organizational innovator, he managed a world-class scientific research library and forged regional, national and international public information and technology collaborations. In 2005 he was awarded the Fellows' Prize for Leadership at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first ever awarded to a nonscientist.
In 1999 he was a co-founder of the Open Archives Initiative to develop interoperable standards for author self-archiving systems. In October 2003 he co-organized the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and in 2004, the Brazilian Declaration on Open Access.
He holds numerous advisory and consultative positions supporting digital library development, electronic publishing and scholarly communication. He was the senior advisor to the Max Planck Society's Center for Information Management (2000-2006) and was an executive board member of the National Information Standards Organization (1998-2004).
Luce was the course director of the International Spring School on the Digital Library and E-Publishing for Science and Technology in Geneva and a founding member and chair of the Alliance for Innovation in Science and Technology Information (AISTI).
Prior to Los Alamos, Luce held positions as the first executive director of the Southeast Florida Library Information Network (SEFLIN), director of Colorado's Irving Library Network and assistant director of the Boulder Public Library in Colorado. He speaks extensively in the areas of digital libraries and scientific communication, quality and change management, and strategic planning.
Luce holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of San Diego, a master's degree in public administration from San Diego State University and master's degree in library and information science from the University of South Florida.
Science vs. Fiction: Thinking and Living the Future on Fast Forward
(Wednesday 7th March 2:45pm)
What future projections are based on science and which are science fiction? Developments in science have not only changed our understanding of the physical world around us, they have also pushed information technologies and associated systems in support of scientific work. As a harbinger for new directions in scholarly communication and working patterns, what can we learn as a glimpse into the future from looking at where the intersection of science and information systems are headed? As we look at these new developments and patterns, many new challenges emerge for how we think about the role and services of libraries to meet the needs of the academy over the next decade. Focusing on the questions we need to be asking ourselves, this talk will provide a framework for thinking about our changing landscape and what it might portend for our organizations and our own roles in the next decade.
Donnchádh Ó Corráin MA DLITT Professor of Medieval History, University College Cork. Educated atUniversity College Cork and School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy, 1982;First Carroll Lecturer, Oxford University, 1990; Foundation Lecturer, Senter for studier i vikingtid og nordisk middelalder, Oslo University, 1993; Senior Research Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford, 1993-94; O'Donnell Lecturer, Oxford University, 1996-97. Founder and editor of Peritia: Journal of the Medieval Academy of Ireland (1981-, 19 volumes). Founder and director of CELT, an Intenet text-base (over 10 million words). Founder and director of MultiText,. Founder and director of ArCH. PublicationsIreland before the Normans, Gill History of Ireland, II (Dublin & London: Gill & Macmillan 1972) and about 150 papers on medieval Irish history and literature. At press: Medieval Irish Books: a survey Irish books and manuscripts, 650 to 1600 (to appear 2007)
CELT & Sister Projects – text bases for historians & literary scholars
(Thursday 8
th March 9.00am)
A description of three digital projects: (i) CELT: Corpus of Electronic
Texts, an Internet academic text-base of Irish literary and historical texts, concept, mark-up, SGML etc; (ii) MultiText, a site for Irish history, about 350,000 words and 4000 graphics, directed to schools and undergraduates; (iii) ArCH (Armarium Codicum Hibernensium), a project to create digital and print facsimiles of the major medieval Irish manuscripts in Irish, British and continental libraries
Enabling mobile communication in an education environment
(Thursday 8th March 1:45pm)
Speaker Greg Tierney
Abstract to follow.
