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G. Sayeed Choudhury to Deliver Spring 2009 Windsor Lecture

February 27, 2009

G. Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for library digital programs at Johns Hopkins University, will present the Spring 2009 Windsor Lecture at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at 1:00 p.m. on March 11, 2009. His lecture, "The Perfect Storm," will address the opportunities and challenges presented by current economic, educational, and technological trends in today’s information age. This year the Windsor Lecture is being presented in conjunction with the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) inaugural e-Research Roundtable.

The convergence of the current economic crisis, lowering of transaction costs, democratization of higher education, and advent of data infrastructure represents a perfect storm that will present significant challenges and opportunities. The resulting decisions and infrastructure developments by communities and institutions will have profound implications for the future.

Choudhury contends that emerging developments in data-intensive scholarship across a range of disciplines might represent the "inflection point" in terms of transformation. While much of the attention in this regard has focused on science and engineering, notable developments in the social sciences and humanities highlight a shift from a collection-centric view to a data-centric view. History shows that previous transformative changes, such as the introduction of the automobile, included a time of hybrid environments when both automobiles and horse-drawn carriages shared the existing infrastructure. Eventually, for societies that experienced tremendous gains in productivity, new systems developed and merged into a new, cohesive infrastructure.

Choudhury is associate dean for library digital programs and Hodson director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. He serves as director of operations for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. He also is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, a research fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a senior presidential fellow with the Council on Library and Information Resources.

The Phineas L. Windsor Lectureship honors the career of Dr. Windsor, who was director of the University of Illinois Library and the Library School from 1909 to 1940. The initial lecture was given in 1949 by John T. Winterich titled "Three Lantern Slides: Books, The Book Trade, and Some Related Phenomena in America, 1876, 1901, and 1926." Gifts from alumni and friends built the fund when Dr. Windsor retired. In 2004 Marian (’50 BA Science and Letters) and Arnold (’50 BS Architectural Studies) Thompson made a gift to this Fund. Marian is a Windsor granddaughter.

TIME: The lecture begins at 1:00 p.m., followed by a reception.

LOCATION: The Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Room 126, 501 East Daniel Street, Champaign, Illinois.

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