Getting a Handle on Federal Information:
Persistent Identification Using Handles®
Biographical Sketches
In Alphabetical Order of Presentation
Sherry Davids joined the National Agricultural Library in 1989 as a cataloger, and in 2001 she became NAL's AGRICOLA Coordinator, where her main duties are to improve and expand access to bibliographic information in AGRICOLA, NAL's online public access catalog. Sherry was chair of NAL's Metadata Task Force, which developed the NAL Metadata Element Set. She also served on the American Library Association's Committee on Cataloging, Description and Access' Metadata Task Force. Before coming to NAL Sherry was assistant Librarian at the Corcoran Gallery of Art Library in Washington DC. She received her M.L.S. from The Catholic University of America. (return to program)
James Erwin became
DTIC Director of Information Science and Technology in December 1999.
Previously, Mr. Erwin had served as the DTIC Director of Operations. He
also served as Director of Operations for the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's Scientific and Technical Information Program (1991-1994)
and Director of Technology for the Defense Applied Information Technology
Center (1986-1990).
A native of Detroit, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics
from the University of Detroit and Master of Public Administration from
American University, Washington, D.C. After receiving his BA, Mr. Erwin
served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Thailand during the Vietnam
conflict. Mr. Erwin joined DTIC as a computer programmer in 1973. (return to program)
Walter L. Finch is Director of Program Planning, for the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). Mr. Walter L. Finch has over 30 years of experience in the information industry. Currently he is Director Program Planning, National Technical Information Service (NTIS), with responsibility for strategic and market planning. He advises the Director on U.S. Government and information industry policy issues and is the NTIS liaison to key Government agencies and information organizations. Prior to this assignment he was Associate Director for Business Development at NTIS.
Mr. Finch received a BS degree in Business Administration from the University
of Maryland and a Master of Public Administration from the American University.
He is active in the Commerce, Energy, EPA, NASA, NLM, NLE, NAL, Defense
and Interior (CENDI) Information Managers Group; the Federal Library and
Information Center Committee (FLICC); the International Council for Scientific
and Technical Information (ICSTI); the National Federation of Abstracting
and Information Services (NFAIS) and is on the Board of Directors of the
Association of Information and Dissemination Centers (ASIDIC). (return to program)
Lillian Gassie is Head of the Technical Services and Systems at the Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate School. She manages the systems and technical services operations of the library and is a member of the NPS IT Task Force for Strategic Planning and the NPS Internet2 Working Group. Previous positions held included Technical Services Librarian at the Army Research Lab's Knowledge Management Center and Systems Librarian at the USGS National Wetlands Research Center. (return to program)
Glenn Handrahan is a Research
Engineer assigned to provide expertise to various US Navy technical data
and training initiatives. These include the Technical Data Knowledge Management
program and the Tech Data/Training Integration program. His current focus
is to develop a prototype using The Handle System technology. Furthermore,
he is researching the applicability of the Shareable Content Object Reference
Model (SCORM) as it may apply to the Navy's technical data community.
For each of these efforts, Mr. Handrahan is investigating the generation
and population of metadata fields using both human-generated (via controlled
vocabularies) and machine-generated (via semantic tagging applications)
methods. Mr. Handrahan formerly was a Navy representative on the Joint
Interoperable Architecture committee. (return to program)
Robert Kahn is the co-inventor of the TCP/IP networking protocol. After receiving a B.E.E. from the City College of New York in 1960, Dr. Kahn earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively. He worked on the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories and then became an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. From there he moved to join Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet. In 1972 he moved to DARPA and subsequently became Director of DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). He is currently Chairman, CEO and President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure. (return to program)
Martha Knott serves as the Chief Librarian at the Redstone Scientific Information Center (RSIC) for the U.S. Army Aviation & Missile Command located on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. RSIC is the Army's largest Scientific and Technical Library. RSIC serves multiple Army commands as well as the NASA and DIA organization and all organization's contractors located in the Huntsville Area. Martha also serves as the POC for the Army Aviation Corridor of Excellence (AACE) online Website. The AACE is a coalition of Defense, industry, academic, and Federal, State and Local Government partners in Army Aviation focused upon and concentrated within, but not limited to, a corridor running from middle Tennessee, south through Alabama, and into the Florida panhandle. Prior to Martha's RSIC service she served as Head of the Naval Ocean R&D Activity Classified Library. The Classified Library served the four Navy Commands located at the NASA Stennis Center in Mississippi. Martha has been elected many times to serve on the Defense Technical Information Center's (DTIC) Users Council. She held many offices for the Users Council including president.
Mrs. Knott earned her BS and MLS at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is a graduate of the Army Management Staff College. She continues her formal education by taking courses at the University of Alabama. Martha was the first federal government librarian selected to serve on the Mississippi State Archives Executive Board and a member of the International Library Science Honor Society Beta Phi Mu. Martha's interest in her community has resulted in her serving as the leader for a variety of civic and volunteer organizations. (return to program)
Larry Lannom is the Director of Information Management Technology for the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which he joined in 1996. CNRI is a not-for-profit organization which undertakes, fosters, and promotes research in the public interest. Its activities center around the strategic development of network-based information technologies. In his current role for CNRI, he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.
Originally trained as a librarian, Larry has over thirty years of experience
in computer science, publishing, and libraries. He has worked in both
academic and commercial environments in the creation and management of
information products and services, research in digital libraries and information
retrieval, development of computer applications, and management studies
in the library and publishing fields. (return to program)
Jane Mandelbaum is currently a systems development manager at the Library of Congress. She has worked at the Library in several positions since 1986, and was previously a business systems analyst with a local management consulting firm. She has a master's degree in library science and in business. (return to program)
Kurt N. Molholm became the Administrator of the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC®) on 3 February 1985. DTIC, an element of the Defense Information Systems Agency, is the central facility for the collection and dissemination of STI for the Department of Defense (DoD). Before coming to DTIC, Mr. Molholm was Chief of the Technology Division, Office of the Assistant Director, Telecommunications and Information Systems, Headquarters, Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). Previous to that he held various computer programmer, system analyst, and computer management positions in the DLA headquarters and various DLA field activities. He served 3 years as an U.S. Army Quartermaster Officer with most of his duty at the Columbus General Depot (now known as the Defense Supply Center, Columbus Ohio). A member of the Senior Executive Service, Mr. Molholm has a BS Degree in Business Administration from the University of Oregon, an MSA in Administration from George Washington University, and is a graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) DoD's senior service school.
He is active in the Scientific and Technical Information community. He is a CENDI Principal and served as the CENDI Chair for several terms. He is the current President of the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI). He is a former member of NATO's Research & Technology Organization (RTO) Technical Information Committee (formerly the Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) Technical Information Panel). He is also has served as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC) and as Chair of the FLICC Policy Committee. He is Chair of the National Information Standards Organization's Z-18 Revision Committee (Technical Reports) and served as Chair of Panel 2 of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science's Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination. Mr. Molholm is a past President of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS). His biography appears in "Who's Who in the United States" and in "Who's Who in the South and Southwest." (return to program)
Barbara Nekoba is the project officer responsible for the development and implementation of the Handle Service for the Defense Technical Information Center. A librarian by profession, Ms. Nekoba has been involved in information management issues for over 20 years. Prior to DTIC, she established the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity Information Center in Quantico Va., and the U.S. Special Operations Command Library in Tampa Florida. She was also a supervisory librarian at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a reference librarian for the Fairfax County Public Library System in northern Virginia. (return to program)
Dr. Norman Paskin became the first Director of The International DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Foundation in March 1998. Prior to this he worked for twenty years in the scientific publishing industry in both the U.S. and Europe, in roles including editorial, management, and information technology development. He was actively involved in information identifiers issues for the scientific technical and medical publishing community, and has published several papers on this and related topics. (return to program)
The International DOI Foundation (http://www.doi.org) was established in 1998 to support the needs of the intellectual property community in the digital environment. The Foundation is supported by member organisations from a broad spread of interests such as technology companies, professional publishers.
Norman has led the DOI Foundation in its development of the DOI as a standardised identifier for the intellectual property communities (including text, music, images, and multimedia), which can work with existing identifiers and internet technology. He is actively involved with a range of related standards activities developments, and is responsible for the appointment of service providers for the efficient operation of the technology and business activities of the DOI system, and in engaging Foundation members in active involvement in defining policies and solutions.
He has recently authored (1) "DRM Technology: Identification and Metadata", Digital Rights Management: Technical, Economic, Juridical and Political Aspects, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (In press) and (2) "Towards a Rights Data Dictionary - Identifiers and Semantics at work on the net", imi insights, June 2002 , http://www.epsltd.com/IMI/IMI.htm (subscription access).
Ed Pentz is Executive Director of
Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), the not-for-profit
membership organization setup in January 2000 to run the CrossRef service.
Before joining CrossRef Ed was Electronic Business Development Manager
at Academic Press and worked on online journals and reference works, linking
strategy and DOI implementation. Prior to that he held editorial and electronic
publishing positions at Academic Press and Harcourt in the UK. Ed was
the Chair of the NISO DOI Syntax Committee and is on the board of directors
of the International DOI Foundation. (return to program)
