Microsoft, libraries and open source

About

We are finally starting to see the early signs of transformation in scholarly publishing. The innovations we've been expecting for years are slowly being adopted, but we can also expect the pace of change to accelerate in the coming 3 to 5 years. At the same time, many of rituals and artifacts of the scholarly communication lifecycle are still rooted in a centuries-old model. What are the primary goals of scholarly communication, and what will be the future role of librarians in that cycle? What are the obstacles in information flow (many of our own design) that can be removed?

Is the library profession moving fast enough to stay ahead of the curve... or are we ever going to be struggling to keep up? With the advent of the data deluge, all-XML workflows, the semantic Web, cloud services and increasingly intelligent mobile devices - what are the implications for libraries, archivists, publishers, scholarly societies as well as individual researchers and scholars? The opportunities are many - but capitalizing on this ever-evolving landscape will require significant changes to our field, changes that we are not currently well-positioned to enact. This talk will map the current scholarly communication landscape - highlighting recent exciting developments, and will focus on the repercussions and some specific recommendations for the broader field of information management.

About the speaker:

Alex Wade is the Director for Scholarly Communication within Microsoft's External Research division, where he oversees several projects related to researcher productivity tools, semantic information capture, and the interoperability of information systems. Alex holds a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley, and a Masters of Librarianship degree from the University of Washington.

During his career at Microsoft, Alex has managed the corporate search and taxonomy management services; has shipped a SharePoint-based document and workflow management solution for…