Herbert Van de Sompel receives first SPARC Innovator award

"SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has named Herbert Van de Sompel, who leads the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), as the first SPARC Innovator. The SPARC Innovator program is a new initiative that recognizes an individual, institution, or group that exemplifies SPARC principles by working to challenge the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators will be featured on the SPARC Web site each month."

Source: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

"Herbert Van de Sompel, the first SPARC Innovator, is the initiator of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the open reference linking framework (OpenURL). The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content, and it has had wide-ranging influence on a variety of other initiatives within the open access and institutional repository movements.

" 'Herbert is one of our leading thinkers on system architecture,' said Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), who has worked extensively with Van de Sompel. 'What's striking to me, however, is the extent to which his work in this area is driven by his commitment to improving information flow and information access within the global system of scholarly communication. This gives his work a concreteness and focus, a validation and verification, that's very important to its quality and depth.'

" 'Herbert Van de Sompel paired a background in technology with a vision of a new infrastructure for information. He brought tremendous dedication and perseverance to the task of finding support and making the connections necessary to see this vision through,' said Heather Joseph, SPARC Executive Director. 'He used his intellect as well as street smarts to make the Open Archives Initiative and OpenURL a reality, and both projects have laid the foundation for research and scholarship to become available to more people than ever before. Herbert's work on global, digital workflow has advanced scholarly communication by leaps and bounds, and his commitment to changing the status quo makes him a worthy recipient of the SPARC Innovator award.'

" 'I am thrilled to be the first SPARC Innovator, and I appreciate the recognition from my peers enormously,' Van de Sompel said. "The one thing with recognitions like these is they tend to put additional pressure on, like people asking what the next big thing is you're working on. I wish I had an answer; I don't because one never really knows whether a thing is big until it actually is. This recognition will help me to keep focus and remain determined.' "

To read more about Van de Sompel, please see the SPARC Innovator Web page.

Source: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)