Short biographies of speakers

Hilde van Wijngaarden  (The Netherlands)

Hilde van Wijngaarden studied history at the University of Amsterdam and wrote her Ph.D as a research assistant at the University of Groningen (2000). In 1999, she started working as an information consultant for an IT-company. Since 2002 she is working at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, first as a project leader for digitization projects and as of January 2003 as a Digital Preservation Officer. She is responsible for new Research and Development in the area of digital preservation, among other things leading a project to develop the Universal Virtual Computer in co-operation with IBM, and conducting research into permanent access strategies. She is a member of the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata.

René van Horik  (The Netherlands)

René van Horik works as a researcher and project leader at the Department of History of the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI-KNAW), one of the research institutes of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Department of History of NIWI-KNAW focuses on the application of information and communication technology for the Humanities and keeps the national data archive on scientific historical data: the Netherlands Historical Data Archive (NHDA). Durability of digital data and digital preservation is an important issue for the institute. René van Horik received his M.A. degree in History at the University of Nijmegen. He is involved in several projects in which ICT is applied in the Humanities. He is working on his dissertation on the longevity of digital images at Delft University of Technology.

Max Kaiser  (Austria)

Max Kaiser studied German Literature and Philosophy at the University of Vienna (Austria) where he worked as a researcher from 1997-2001. He joined the Austrian National Library in 2000 and has been involved in several national and European projects and initiatives in the field of digital libraries. Max Kaiser is co-ordinator of research and development projects at the Austrian National Library and a member of the digital preservation team.

Heike Neuroth (Germany)

Heike Neuroth holds a Ph.D in Geology. Since 1997 she is working at the Goettingen State and University Library (SUB, Germany) and is the head of the department Research and Development. She is enganged in several national and international initiatives, projects and working groups dealing with digital libraries. She is an expert in the field of metadata, digital preservation, subject gateways. She is also the secretary of DINI (German Initiative for Network Information) which was originated from the Coalition of Network Information (CNI) in the USA.

Andreas Aschenbrenner  (Austria)

Andreas Aschenbrenner was a driving force in designing and establishing the Austrian On-Line Archive (AOLA). AOLA was a pilot project by the Austrian National Library and the Vienna University of Technology on collecting and preserving cultural heritage from the Internet. After graduating in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology, Andreas Aschenbrenner joined the ERPANET project as a Content Editor. ERPANET works to enhance the preservation of digital resources through raising awareness and disseminating expertise.

Thomas Severiens  (Germany)

Born in 1970. Diploma in Physics in 1999. Worked in several research projects on the field of digital library implementation and metadata object description (visit http://www.severiens.de/proj.html for a list of projects of interest) Currently: Writing several surveys about the international implementation of preservation policies and how they could be implemented in Germany. Also on the status of scientific raw data (primary data) in european research institutions and how good they are prepared for long term preservation. Giving lectures on information engineering at the university of osnabrueck.

Neil Beagrie  (United Kingdom)

Neil is responsible for developing and managing partnership activities between the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library, a post he took up in early January 2004. Prior to this he was a Programme Director in JISC developing policy, guidance to institutions, and collaborative programmes, for digital preservation and/or electronic records and digital collection management on behalf of the Higher and Further Education Councils and institutions in the UK. He was research director and co-author of the study Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook published by the British Library in November 2001. He has co-ordinated the development of a Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK and became its first Company Secretary. He was previously Assistant Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service. At the AHDS he developed digital collections policy and standards and published extensively on digital preservation issues. He was joint author with Daniel Greenstein of the study A Strategic Policy Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections. Prior to joining the AHDS in 1997, he was Head of Archaeological Archives and Library at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and was active there in developing national data standards and collection management for archaeological and architectural records.

Rauber Andreas  (Austria)

Andreas Rauber is Associate Professor at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology. He received his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In 2001 he joined the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) in Pisa as an ERCIM Research Fellow, followed by an ERCIM Research position at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), at Rocquencourt, France, in 2002. In 1998 he received the ÖGAI Award of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ÖGAI), and the Cor-Baayen Award of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM ) in 2002. He has published numerous papers in refereed journals and international conferences and served as PC member and reviewer for several major journals, conferences and workshops. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence (ÖGAI), and serves on the board of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL). His research interests cover the broad scope of exploring information spaces, including specifically text and music information retrieval and organization, information visualization, as well as data analysis and neural computation. He is actively involved in several research projects in the field of digital libraries, focusing on the organization and exploration of large information spaces, as well as Web archiving and digital preservation.

Reinhard Altenhöner  (Germany)

Born in 1963 in Detmold, Germany. Married, 5 children. Studies in the humanities and ICT, postgraduate studies in library sciences. 1993 - 1994. Assistant to the library group of the German Research Foundation (DFG). 1994 - 2000. Head of the library system of the Muenster University of Applied Sciences. Range of tasks: Establishment of an integrated library system, developing parts of the digital library of North-Rhine-Westphalia. 2000 - 2002. Head librarian of the library system in Mainz:. Range of tasks: Reorganisation of the system (quality management), integration and development of digital services (Web, databases, projects). 2002 - now. Head of the IT-department in Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt. Range of tasks: Responsibility for the IT-structure and -services at the locations Frankfurt/Main, Leipzig and Berlin, national and European projects, cooperation with national/international committees for standards for technical and general approaches

Michael Day  (United Kingdom)

Michael Day is a Research Officer at UKOLN, based at the University of Bath (United Kingdom). Since joining UKOLN in 1996, he has worked on a range of metadata-related research projects, which have mostly concerned the development of Internet subject gateways, interoperability, and digital preservation. His most recent projects include ePrints UK, which is concerned with the development of services that will give access to the content of institutional repositories, and a feasibility study on web-archiving in the UK. He is also involved with the new UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC), a national focus for research and expertise relating to digital preservation issues, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Research Councils' eScience Core Programme.

Monika Segbert  (Germany)

Monika Segbert provides technical advice, management expertise and international dissemination and scientific exchange activities to multi-national programmes in the cultural sector. She is involved in several international projects in the cultural heritage sector: with the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute in Budapest to create a multi-country consortium of library consortia in 50 countries to harness their buying power for affordable access to electronic journals, and to make accessible content produced in those countries; with the EU TACIS programme in developing a portal to the bibliographic and full text digital resources of the 5 biggest Russian libraries; with the Mellon Foundation in carrying out the retroconversion of the serials catalogue of the Russian State Library; with the Conference of European National Libraries CENL in surveying the structure and activities of this association. Recently she worked with DG Information Society of the European Commission in the TRIS project, to co-ordinate 25 new projects trialling the application of new ICT's in libraries, museums and archives in the EU and the new accession states of Central and Eastern Europe, in the CULTIVATE Russia project to transfer research results in the digital cultural heritage sector to the Russian Federation and with the Mellon Foundation on introducing library automation in the Russian State Library, Moscow. Monika Segbert also regularly reviews projects and evaluates proposal for the European Commission Cultural Heritage programme.
From 1998 - 2000 she was based in Moscow as the team leader of the EU TACIS project for the Creation of an Information System for the Russian State Library. From 1995 -1998 she worked with the European Commission DGXIII Telematics for Libraries programme, with primary responsibility for developing research cooperation for the sector with the new accession countries. Prior to that Monika Segbert served in the British Council in Germany as Head, Libraries, Information and Books.