Library Platform Advisory Group, 2006-2007

John has recently accepted the position of Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives working for Alan Gray at the Darien Public Library in Darien, Connecticut.

Until February 2007, John Blyberg was the Systems Administrator and Lead Developer for the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was instrumental in the design, development and deployment of their popular new web site. He has also been responsible for the complete overhaul of their network infrastructure and the addition of many vital patron services. John has been named by Library Journal as a 2006 "Mover & Shaker".

Previously, John worked as the IT manager for the North American branch of the United Kingdom-based car company Lotus Engineering. During that time, he authored a customer management system (CMS) and created a paperless, web-based log system in order to earn ISO 9001 compliance.

John holds a BA in English from the University of Maine and attended three semesters of graduate work in creative writing from the University of Michigan before, in his own words, 'he left to become a geek.'

He is the author of "blyberg.net" at: www.blyberg.net.

Jill is responsible for the creation of the operational service, The European Library. The success so far of this service has led to the European Union giving their strategic backing to The European Library for the creation of the European Digital Library.

Jill has a strong web publishing background, having worked for VNU as their European Business Development Director transferring the lessons learnt from commercial business-to-business publishing to scholarly publishing working for Blackwell Publishing and several other academic publishers in the UK.

Prior to a publishing career, she worked in the online environment for many years, first as a researcher with her own company First Contact (now owned by Thomson). After selling this company Jill worked as the Event & Marketing Director for Online Information. Now combining the skills of web publishing, marketing, research knowledge and business development she heads the growing www.theeuropeanlibrary.org. Jill holds a Geography degree and a Ph.D in 16th Century Arabic and Turkish Sea Charts.

Juha Hakala has been working with library automation since 1987, first in the Automation Unit of Finnish Research Libraries and since 1993 in the National Library.

Juha had a central role in making the Dublin Core a Finnish national standard (it was published as SFS 5895 in November 2001). He also was involved with the creation of a DC extension for Finnish government publications, and is a member of the Dublin Core Metadata Intitiative Board.

In addition to metadata formats Juha is interested in identification of electronic resources. He is at present a member of the ISSN Governing board and on the working group developing ISTC, the International Standard Textual Work Code. He has also registered URN namespaces for ISBN and national bibliography numbers.

Professor Royan is CEO of the e-library, e-culture consultancy Concurrent Computing Ltd, whose clients include the British Council, Tate Gallery, Department of Health and the BBC.

He has managed networked library and information systems and services for British Telecom, the London Borough of Camden, The British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Singapore Library Network (SILAS), the University of Stirling and Robert Gordon University, and has lectured on libraries and the net in 40 countries across 6 continents.

He has provided library automation consultancy to clients in Japan, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Philippines, as well as the UK Department of Trade and Industry, National Museums Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.

He pioneered web-based library services at Stirling in 1993, and in 1996 he founded SCRAN, a networked multimedia resource of millions of objects, digitised from libraries, museums, archives and the built heritage, and licensed for educational use.

A Chartered IT Professional and an Honorary Fellow of CILIP, Bruce is Secretary of the Management and Technology Section of IFLA, and Visiting Professor of Communication Arts at Napier University.

Tim created LibraryThing as a pet project, in order to catalogue his own library and those of his academic and bibliophile friends. He had no idea it would explode like it did. Before LibraryThing, Tim was a graduate student in Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan, and worked for Houghton Mifflin in Boston and as a freelance web developer and web publisher. Previous projects include www.isidore-of-seville.com, www.ancientlibrary.com and www.bramblestory.com. Tim is married to HarperCollins author Lisa Carey.

Ben Toth is the Director of Health Perspectives, an information management consultancy specialising in the health care sector. He trained in medicine in the 1970s and as a librarian in the 1980s, going on to work in Universities and the NHS in a variety of roles. In 1998 he established the National electronic Library for Health with Sir Muir Gray. He then worked for Connecting for Health, where he directed the National Knowledge Service, a workstream of the National Programme for IT specialising in the integration of knowledge services and clinical records.

Dr. Weinberger began his "career" in the late '70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey's Stockton State College. During this time he maintained a steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places such as The New York Times and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and TV Guide.

In 1985, he became a junior marketing guy at Interleaf, an innovative start-up with new ideas on how to create and structure documents, where he helped to launch the industry's first enterprise document management system and electronic document publishing system. In the early '90s, he was one of the five founders of SGML Open, now known as OASIS. He left Interleaf after 8 years, as VP of Strategic Marketing.

He founded the one-person strategic marketing company, Evident Marketing, in 1994. In late 1995, he joined Open Text as VP of Strategic Marketing where, as part of the senior management team, he helped Open Text move from one of the first Web search engine companies (the engine behind Yahoo!) to market- and thought-leadership in Web-based collaborative software.

After helping to take Open Text public in 1996, Dr. Weinberger returned to consulting, writing and speaking, participating in founding a couple of dot-coms, and serving on industry and company boards. In 2000, Perseus published the national best-seller The Cluetrain Manifesto of which he is a co-author.

In 2002, Perseus published Small Pieces Loosely Joined to enthusiastic reviews. Dr. Weinberger currently writes too much, including too many weblogs articles for Wired, Salon, USAToday, The Guardian, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, and lots more. He is working on a book about how the digitization of information is changing the most basic ways that we organize and classify the things of our world.