Speakers biographies

Jane Core
Professor Jane Core is Director of Library and Learning Services at Northumbria University and the current Chair of SCONUL.

Jane chairs the JISC ELearning Capital Programme Board and sits on the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee, the UK Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellowship Advisory Board, the UKRR Advisory Board and the Libraries of the Future Steering Board.

Karla Hahn
Karla Hahn is the Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the Association of Research Libraries, a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries at comprehensive, research-extensive institutions in the US and Canada. It has a long history of leadership in promoting positive change in the scholarly communication system. Key focuses of current activity include the assessment and implementation of new scholarly communication models; the development of alliances to advance of new systems of scholarly communication; and advancement of library outreach efforts to inform the educational and research communities on issues relating to scholarly communication.

Hahn holds both an MLS and a PhD and has published extensively on issues relating to publishing, electronic communication and libraries.

Sue McKnight
Professor Sue McKnight is Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources at Nottingham Trent University. Sue is responsible for library services across NTU’s three campuses and for leading the University’s strategic developments in e-learning and knowledge management.

Her major research interest is ‘customer value discovery’, especially as this relates to libraries and eLearning. Sue has published demonstrating the applied nature of her research, and the improvement in customer satisfaction when strategies to deliver the defined values are implemented.

She is an active member of IFLA and currently chairs its Academic and Research Libraries Section. She is a Fellow of both CILIP and the Australian Institute of Management. Sue was named a National Teaching Fellow in June 2008 by the Higher Education Academy (UK) and was named Manager of the Year by the Australian Library & Information Association in 1999.

She currently chairs the JISC eBooks Working Party and is Vice-Chair of the JISC National eBooks Observatory Project. Sue is also a member of the Pearson Education Strategic Advisory Board.

Deborah Shorley
Deborah Shorley is Director of Library Services at Imperial College, London and responsible for thirteen libraries across the campuses, as well as the large virtual collection of electronic resources which support the College’s learning, teaching and research.

Deborah took up her current post in October 2007. She came to Imperial from the University of Sussex, where she had been Librarian since 2000. Before that her entire professional career had been in Northern Ireland, latterly as Assistant Director of Information Services at the University of Ulster.

Jean Sykes
Jean Sykes has been Librarian and Director of IT Services at the LSE since January 1998.

Since 2003 Jean has led Nereus, a European consortium of 22 economics research libraries from twelve European countries. With European Commission funds Nereus is building a European digital subject repository, Economists Online.

Jean also chairs the national Digitisation Advisory Group which oversees JISC’s large-scale £24 million digitisation programme, one of the largest public sector digitisation programmes in the world.

During 2008 Jean has been director of a major HEFCE-funded shared services feasibility study which is evaluating the feasibility of creating a UK research data service (UKRDS), and while the sponsors of the project are RLUK and RUGIT, SCONUL and UCISA are also heavily involved as key stakeholders.