Dr. Francine Berman featured speaker at ALCTS 2010 President’s Program

Contact: Charles Wilt


Executive Director, ALCTS


312-280-5030

NEWS


For Immediate Release


May 4, 2010

CHICAGO-The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services will present Dr. Francine Berman, vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as the featured speaker for the 2010 ALCTS President’s Program at the ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The President’s Program begins at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, June 28 in the Washington Convention Center, Ballroom B.

The title of Dr. Berman’s presentation is “Got Data? New Roles for Libraries in Shaping 21st Century Research.” Research in the Information Age is driven by digital data. Libraries are emerging as critical partners in the curation, access, use, re-use and preservation of research data. Digital stewardship, and the requisite cyber-infrastructure, economic models and policies required to administer and protect research data, present both new opportunities and challenges for 21st century libraries. In this talk, she will describe the emerging role for libraries as stewards of valued digital research collections.

Dr. Berman is an international leader in the development of cyberinfrastructure and has written more than 165 articles, editorials and reports spanning the areas of high-performance computing, grid computing, scheduling, programming environments and middleware, cyberinfrastructure and digital data stewardship and preservation. She is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and senior member of the IEEE.

From 2001 to 2009, Dr. Berman served as director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where she led a staff of more than 250 interdisciplinary scientists, engineers and technologists. SDSC is internationally known for its leadership in data-oriented science, technology and cyberinfrastructure, and its deep expertise in high performance computing and applications. She was the first holder of the High Performance Computing Chair in the University of California – San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Dr. Berman is one of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid project and also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. She has served on numerous national and international leadership groups and committees including the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health’s NIGMS Advisory Committee, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Board of Trustees, and others. She is currently serving as co-Chair for the international Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and Newsweek, and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum.

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats.

ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.