Speakers biographies

Ronald Barnett
Ronald Barnett is Pro-Director for Longer Term Strategy at the Institute of Education, University of London, where he is also Professor of Higher Education. In the former role, Professor Barnett led responsibility in preparing the Institute’s new Corporate Strategy. Much of his current work is on the conceptual understanding of the university and higher education. His key question: is it possible to sustain an educational idea of the university in the twenty-first century. Three of Professor Barnett’s many books have been national prizewinners: The idea of higher education (1990), The limits of competence (1994) and Beyond all reason: living with ideology in the university (2003). Amongst his consultancies, he led the team and wrote the report analysing responses to the Dearing Committee’s public consultation, and led HEFCE’s ‘Barnett report’ on national quality systems.

Geoffrey Bilder
Geoffrey Bilder is Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, and has over 15 years experience as a technical leader in scholarly technology. He co-founded Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group in 1993, providing the Brown academic community with advanced technology consulting in support of their research, teaching and scholarly communication. He was subsequently head of IT R&D; at Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2002 to 2005, Geoffrey was Chief Technology Officer of scholarly publishing firm Ingenta, and just prior to joining CrossRef, he was a Publishing Technology Consultant at Scholarly Information Strategies, where he consulted extensively with publishers and librarians on emerging social software technologies and how they may affect scholarly and professional researchers.

Anne Burrows
Anne is a Leadership Foundation Associate and was previously a Professional Development Adviser at Aston University where she was responsible for Leadership and Management Development programmes for all levels of staff. She is an experienced trainer and developer and also an executive coach, a skill that she uses to help leaders to apply their knowledge in order to solve problems and issues in the workplace.

Steven Hall
Steven Hall is Commercial Director of Wiley-Blackwell, the new publishing entity formed from the merger of Wiley's STM (scientific, technical and medical) publishing division and Blackwell Publishing. It publishes more than 1,250 peer-reviewed journals, many on behalf of scholarly societies and professional associations, and thousands of books annually. Steven's responsibilities include Wiley-Blackwell’s central marketing operations, research and analysis, online publishing strategy and market development, including pricing and business models.

Steven came to Wiley-Blackwell from Blackwell where he was Journal Sales and Marketing Director. Before joining Blackwell in 2004 he worked in database publishing with Chadwyck-Healey and ProQuest and in academic publishing with Macmillan Press. He has held a variety of senior positions in his publishing career, in sales, marketing, editorial and general management. He has been closely involved in the development of Blackwell policies in relation to Open Access.

Joan K. Lippincott
Joan K. Lippincott is the Associate Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE. Joan held positions in the libraries of Cornell, Georgetown, George Washington University, and SUNY at Brockport and also worked for the Research and Policy Analysis Division of the American Council on Education. She has written articles and made presentations on such topics as Net Gen students, networked information, learning spaces, collaboration among professional groups, assessment, and teaching and learning in the networked environment. She holds a doctorate in higher education from University of Maryland.

Ronald Milne
Director of Scholarship and Collections at the British Library since February 2007, Ronald Milne has had a career in research libraries in the UK. He has worked at the University of London (on the staff of the Library Resources Co-ordinating Committee), Glasgow University, Trinity College Cambridge, King’s College London and the University of Oxford, where he was Deputy (subsequently Acting) Director of University Library Services. Prior to taking up the Oxford post, Ronald was based at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Director of the Research Support Libraries Programme, a £30M initiative funded by the UK’s Higher Education Funding Councils. Ronald has been a member of the Board of the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles and is Chair of the UK’s National Preservation Office Board and of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

James G. Neal
Jim Neal is currently the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, providing leadership for university academic computing and a system of twenty-five libraries. His responsibilities include the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), the Center for Digital Research, the Copyright Advisory Office, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research. Previously, he served as the Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University. At Columbia, he has focused on the development of the digital library, special collections, global resources, instructional technology, library facility construction and renovation, electronic scholarship, and fundraising programs.

Amongst other offices, Jim Neal has served on the Councils and Boards of the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and he has been President or Chair of ARL, RLG, and of OCLC’s Research Library Advisory Council. He has represented the American library community in testimony on copyright matters before Congressional committees, was an adviser to the U.S. delegation at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) diplomatic conference on copyright. He was selected the 1997 Academic Librarian of the Year by the Association of College and Research Libraries and is the 2007 recipient of ALA’s Hugh Atkinson Memorial Award.

Douglas Tallack
Douglas Tallack is Professor of American Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham, where he has responsibility for the University’s international activities, including its campuses in China and Malaysia. He was formerly Head of the School of American & Canadian Studies and Dean of Arts.

He has twice won the Arthur Miller Prize for the best American Studies article of the year. He is the editor of a forthcoming series of electronic books on international themes to be published by Melbourne University Press, and will edit the volume on Global Cities/ Local Sites.

Professor Tallack directed the 3Cities project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has been a member of the UK Government’s Marshall Commission, as well as local school and college governing bodies, and is currently on the Advisory Board of the Observatory for Borderless Education.