2005 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award winner announced
Contact: Mary Taylor
312-280-4267
For Immediate Release
February 16, 2005
2005 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award winner announced
CHICAGO - Dan Chudnov is the 2005 recipient of the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award.
Chudnov is a librarian who, currently, serves as a programmer at Yale's Center for Medical Informatics.
"Dan Chudnov has demonstrated exemplary entrepreneurship over time in bringing together professionals to develop innovative information technology products for, and provide innovative services to, the library world," said Russ Bailey, award committee chair. "The LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award Committee stands unanimous in selecting Dan Chudnov as the 2005 Award recipient."
Chudnov played a major role in the Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (JAKE), the open source tool for distributing information about journal and online journal products.
While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dan's work was central in the development of DSpace, one of the leading content management software tools at the heart of numerous institutional repositories.
Chudnov led in the creation of two online communities (oss4lib and usrlib) and in the organization of successful hackfests at Access2003 and Access2004. He has been described by a colleague as "a continual source of new ideas, and seems to be able to effortlessly bring people together to collaborate."
Most recently, Chudnov led in the development of Unalog, an open source link sharing application that is finding wide usage and acceptance.
Another colleague said,
"no one is more influential in the area of Open Source software and the use of technology for social computing in libraries than Dan Chudnov."
The LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award recognizes exemplary entrepreneurship by providing an innovative product or service designed to meet the needs of the library world.
Sponsored by Thomson Gale and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), the award includes a check for $5,000 and a certificate of recognition.
The award will be presented at the LITA President's Program on Sunday, June 26, 2005, at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.
