ADMINISTRATION

Ruth has been working for the National Library of the Netherlands since December 2006. She has worked as the a Salary Administrator and in the Personnel Departments of various companies. In the National Library she works in Financial Administration. Since September 2007 she has been involved in the Financial aspects of EDLnet (travel claims, EC financial procedures etc) and will be responsible for the financial reporting procedures of The European Library itself. In her spare time Ruth likes Aerobics, Photography, Walking and has a passion for Austria and Skiing!

THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY

Olaf D. Janssen (1973) is a project & account manager for The European Library (TEL) , the collaborative platform and joint webservice of the 48 national libraries of Europe. In 2004 he was asked to coordinate the technical & editorial development of the project. His previous position was at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Royal Library of The Netherlands, where he was editor in chief for Gabriel, the precursor of TEL. He has been involved in a number of EU-funded projects to expand and improve The European Library. TEL-ME-MOR (2005-2007) brought the bibliographic catalogues and digital collections of the 10 New Member States of the EU into TEL.

EDLproject (2006-2008) integrated the national libraries of 9 more EU and EFTA Member States and was a first step in the creation of Europeana , the digital library, museum and archive of Europe.

Lizzy Komen was born in Haarlem (1979). After some years of travelling through various parts of the world, Lizzy finalised her Masters degree in Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam in 2007; her Master thesis subject was dedicated to Shared Cultural Heritage between The Netherlands and former Dutch colony Indonesia. Before joining The European Library, Lizzy worked as an intern at The Tropical Museum in Amsterdam, where she helped set up an exhibition dedicated to the Iranian painter Khosrow Hassanzadeh. Lizzy loves playing the guitar, photography, movies, cooking and of course travelling.

TECHNICAL DEVELOPER'S TEAM

Eric van der Meulen (1968), though a native of The Netherlands, spent 20 years in Canada where he graduated from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) with a degree in English Literature. As a computer and technology enthusiast he also studied computer science and finite and discreet mathematics at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby). Books and computer science merged when in 2004 he started working for the National Library of The Netherlands and in 2005 for The European Library.

Metadata standards and interoperability, interface and help text translation coordination, mailing list management and virtual meeting moderation.

Repke was born in The Netherlands. He studied Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and has self thought IT skills. His has had different positions in international social sciences involving data archiving and sharing. Repke has worked as a data miner for internet research, as a researcher for Best Practices Scientific Information Services and is currently working for the Digital Library and Online Services Development for The National Library of The Netherlands. (see: http://www.linkedin.com/in/repke)

For EDLnet Repke will be involved in writing functional requirements for the Work Package Leaders as part of the development process to create a maquette and series of prototypes. He will make recommendations and user requirements originating from the 5 working groups of WP1 (“Political/Human/Inter-community interoperability”), WP2 (“Technical and Semantic Interoperability”) and WP3 (“Users and Usability”) in order to turn them into functional requirements for the technical implementation.

His hobbies are mountain walking, meeting friends and colleagues internationally. He is also dedicated to contributing to digital library efforts in Africa. (see: http://www.sagreenstone.unam.na/index.html)

EDLNET

Catherine Lupovici has many years of experience in digital libraries, being Director of the Digital Library Department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Bnf) prior to joining the EDLnet Office. Catherine was involved in the development of the Web archiving new services in the Bnf, in the development of the trusted digital repository and in the contribution of BnF to the definition of what a European Digital Library might be through the Europeana maquette and prototype as well as in the Gallica online digital library.

After her master in librarianship Catherine became Director of the Académie nationale de Médecine Library for five years. She was then in charge of the organisation of the French Academic libraries cooperative network including the cooperative acquisition policies and union catalogues in the Ministry of Education Library office. She worked after in Jouve SA French printed company involved in data capture and electronic publishing were she led several European Research and Development projects bringing together libraries, publishers and research laboratories specialised in information technologies.

Catherine has a degree in Physic and Chemistry and loves the history of sciences.

Jon Purday joined EDLnet in September 2007 on secondment from the British Library, where he was Head of Corporate Communications. Previous roles include communications manager for the British Library’s bibliographic services and for its digital programmes during the 1990s. He began his career as the first Curator of Recorded Literature at the National Sound Archive. He has been on secondment before – for a short spell in New York working on an archive of recorded poetry, and more recently working on online communications at the Halifax, a major financial services provider.

He read English at the University of Sussex, and did postgraduate studies in marketing at Manchester Business School. He is a Chartered Member of the Institute of Marketing, and has taught communications on their professional development course.

His interests include cycling, glassmaking, architecture and - perhaps anachronistically - collecting books and prints.

Go Sugimoto joined the EDLnet Office in February 2008; he is responsible for interoperability issues between libraries, museums, archives, and audio-visual archives. Go is Japanese and has a long working experience in Europe. He graduated from Keio University in Tokyo, specialising in Carthaginian archaeology. He then spent 4 years in the UK, studying an MA in Heritage Management at the University of Birmingham (Ironbridge) and Msc in Archaeological Information Systems at the University of York while working for Wessex Archaeology (Salisbury), an excavation company. Go then returned to Japan and started another career at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo as a researcher. Before joining EDLnet, Go stayed in Italy for 2 years as a CHIRON (Cultural Heritage Informatics Research Oriented Network) fellow in Vast-lab, PIN, the University of Florence. He has more than 15 academic publications in English and Japanese and attended international conferences during the last 5 years. Go is passionate about cultural heritage management and the use of high-tech/computer for archaeology and humanities. We invite you to visit his project website: Digital Data Survey for Japanese Archaeology (JAD2). Go loves playing the guitar, Tango dancing, swimming, badminton, and photography.

ARCHIVES

Cesar Esponda (1980) was born in Mexico City. After finishing his Bachelor in Communication Sciences, he went to the Netherlands to study a Master degree in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. This cursus allowed him to get an insight into the world of digital access to cultural heritage. In September 2007 Cesar joined The European Library, where he worked on the static content of the website. He loves literature, music, films, visiting museums and travelling.

Christoph (1977) was born in Rotterdam and grew up in Munich, Helsinki and Dublin. He studied English Literature and History in Trinity College, Dublin, where he has also completed his Ph.D. on “The Antwerp Question” and the German occupation of Belgium during the First Wolrd War. After a year’s traineeship in the National Library of Ireland he enrolled in the School of Information and Library Studies at University College Dublin. He is combining his Master’s thesis on multilingual interoperability of controlled vocabulary with his work in The European Library, where he will contribute to EDLProject WorkPackage 2, Task 3: cross-language access to bibliographic subject data. He joined the office in June 2007 and will stay for three months. Though a decent juggler, he is still a beginner at table soccer.