Speakers listed in alphabetical order

Jeremy Atkinson

Jeremy Atkinson has extensive experience and expertise in leadership, management, and development in academic library services. He has worked as a Library and Information Services Consultant for the past eight years, with a number of high-profile clients including Jisc, SCONUL and individual UK universities, including work on open access, repositories and copyright. He previously had overall responsibility for the strategic and operational management of library and information services at the University of South Wales. Jeremy has produced a wide range of books, papers and conference papers on topics including technology and change management, electronic resources, library collaboration and quality assurance.

Sonja Cilliers

Sonja is a senior lecturer at the Stellenbosh University Business School on the MBA and PGDip programmes. She holds a BComm LLB (Stell), BCompt Hons (Unisa), MPhil (management coaching) cum laude (Stell) and is a Chartered Accountant (SA). Sonja is also a certified ICF accredited coach with the ACC designation and has extensive experience in corporate coaching, mentoring, training and facilitation. Having previously worked as an audit manager and lead development facilitator at Deloitte in Cape Town and New York, her area of research interest is the promotion and development of emotional intelligence in organisations, specifically within the auditing profession.

 

Dr Andrew Cox

Andrew Cox is a Senior Lecturer at the Information School, University of Sheffield. Much of his research has been around the impact of information professionals in such areas as the management of research data, in supporting well-being, in the management of space, and most recently their potential roles in artificial intelligence. Author of around 100 peer-reviewed articles, his work includes the book, Exploring Research Data Management (2018) and The impact of AI, machine learning, automation and robotics on the information professions: A report for CILIP.

 

Prof Brito Cruz

Brito Cruz is the Senior Vice-President, Research Networks, at Elsevier and an Emeritus Professor of the Physics Institute, Unicamp, Brazil. He directed the Physics Institute at Unicamp, was the Vice-President for Research at Unicamp, President of the São Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP, and the President of Unicamp. From 2005 to 2020 he was the Science Director at the São Paulo Research Foundation, FAPESP, in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2019 he was a co-chair of the Global Research Council (GRC). Brito Cruz is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and of The World Academy of Science (TWAS). He is a Fellow of the AAAS and of the American Physical Society. Recently, he was appointed by the U.N. as a member of the 10-Member Group for the Technology Facilitation Mechanism for the Sustainable Development Goals. He received the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), the Order of the Scientific Merit (Brazil) and the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Dr Lorraine Haricombe

Lorraine J. Haricombe is the Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin where she provides strategic leadership to position UT Libraries for the future. She has previously served as Dean of the University of Kansas Libraries (2006-15), where she was Provost’s Designate for implementing the Open Access policy at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas, the first public university in the USA after Harvard University and MIT, where faculty adopted an institutional policy on Open Access. Haricombe launched the Coalition for Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) while at the University of Kansas in 2011.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Research Libraries in North America and served as its president in 2019-2020. She has held several leadership positions including Chair of the Steering Committee of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC); Chair of the Greater Western Alliance of Libraries (GWLA) and is an elected member of the International Federation of Library Associations’ (IFLA) Standing Committee on Academic and Research Libraries. She serves on Harvard Libraries’ Visiting Committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts and on the Hesburgh Libraries Advisory Council at Notre Dame University, Indiana, USA.

Haricombe holds a bachelor’s and honours degree in library and information science from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and masters and doctoral degrees in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA.

Norman Hebler

Norman Hebler is currently Head of the Makerspace at the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service. Norman’s interests lie in electronics, robotics, makerspaces, STEM education, 4IR and 3D technologies. He has also previously co-presented at the National ASAUDIT Technology Event (NATE) conferences. Norman has undergraduate degrees from the University of Pretoria and University of South Africa. Prior to joining Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service, he worked at the University of Cape Town for over a decade.

Prof Lisa Hinchliffe

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the University’s School of Information Sciences. At Illinois, she has served as Acting Head of the University High School Library, Head of the Undergraduate Library, Acting Coordinator for Staff Development and Training, and Coordinator for Strategic Planning in the University Library. Previously, she was the Library Instruction Coordinator at Illinois State University and Reference Librarian at Parkland Community College.

She served as the 2010-2011 President of the Association of College and Research Libraries, which launched the Value of Academic Libraries Initiative during her presidency. Along with Debra Gilchrist, she is the lead designer for ACRL’s training program for the Standards for Libraries in Higher Education and the IMLS-funded Assessment in Action project. In addition to her work in ACRL, Lisa has served on numerous American Library Association (ALA) and division committees.

Lisa has presented and published widely on information literacy, teaching and learning, the value of libraries, library assessment, program evaluation, and organizational innovation. Her most recent book is Environments for Student Growth and Development: Libraries and Student Affairs in Collaboration (co-edited with Melissa Autumn Wong).

Robert Kiley

Robert Kiley is Head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust where he is responsible for developing and implementing an open research strategy. The overarching aim is to help ensure that researchers are equipped, empowered and motivated to make research outputs findable, accessible and usable – and to use these outputs to accelerate research and improve health. Over the past decade he has played a leading role in the implementation of Wellcome’s open access policy and overseeing the development of the Europe PubMed Central repository. Robert also acts as the point of contact for eLife, the open-access research journal, launched in 2012 with the support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, and more recently championed the work to create a new open publishing platform for Wellcome researchers – Wellcome Open Research. Robert is a qualified librarian and an Associate Member of CILIP. He also sits as a Director on the ORCID Board.

Prof Lis Lange

Prof Lis Lange is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning at the University of Cape Town. Until January 2018 she was Vice-Rector: Academic at the University of the Free State (UFS), a position she held since 2014. Before this, she was Senior Director heading the Directorate for Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the same university.

Before joining the UFS in 2011, she was the Executive Director (2006-2010) of the Higher Education Quality Committee of the Council of Higher Education (CHE), and Acting CEO of the same organisation between August 2007 and April 2008. She has been involved in the development and implementation of science and technology and higher education policy in South Africa for a decade and a half, working in different capacities at the Human Sciences Research Council, the National Research Foundation and the Council on Higher Education.

Prof Lange’s research interests are focused on the philosophy and politics of education. She has done research on change in higher education as well as on the meanings and possibilities of the notion of transformation, especially at curricular level. Her current work explores the vitality of Hannah Arendt’s thinking to understand higher education.

Prof Lange studied in Argentina, Mexico and South Africa, where she obtained a PhD in South African history from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1998.

Dr Daniel Le Roux

Over the past 10 years Daniel has studied various dimensions of the interaction between humans and technology. His research emphasis falls on the cognitive and behavioural processes by which humans, both individually and collectively, adopt and adapt to technologies, and how this impacts their performance and well-being. The most recent research considers the potential impacts of “permanently online, permanently connected” living on mental well-being, with particular emphasis on attention distribution. He started and head up the Cognition and Technology Research Group at Stellenbosch University which publishes in a wide range of academic domains including Information Systems, Psychology, Education and Economics.

 

Elizabeth Moll-Willard

Elizabeth Moll-Willard graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies (PGDipLIS) from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2014, after having completed her Bachelor of Law (LLB) at Stellenbosch University. She initially  worked  as a faculty librarian for the Law Faculty at UCT, and thereafter for the Humanities Faculty. Since September 2018, she has worked at Stellenbosch University Library, first as a librarian within the Research Commons and from May 2019, as a faculty librarian for the AgriSciences Faculty. Her interests lie in exploring new library services and initiatives, with a focus on new avenues for research support and new methodologies for information literacy. Some of her previous notable projects include the publishing of Open Access Monographs using the PKP Open Monograph Press tool at UCT, the creation of a game (Ref-Hack) to teach students the UCT Harvard referencing method and the further exploration of gamification to teach information literacy skills. Elizabeth completed her Masters in Library and Information Studies (MPhil) in 2019, which focused on the research support services offered by law librarians to legal scholars at universities in the Western Cape.

Sibongiseni Mrwashu

Sibongiseni is a dynamic problem solver. Her interests are in anything that involves literacies, information science, and information technology. She has vast experience from working in various departments at the University of Cape Town and at Stellenbosch University and is always keen on a challenge. She has just started working at the University of the Western Cape as a librarian. She holds a BSc Environmental and Geographical Sciences and Ocean and Atmospheric Science (UCT), and a PG Dip Library and Information Science (UCT).

Prof Denis Ocholla

Professor Ocholla joined the University of Zululand as Professor and Head of the Department of Library and Information Science(1996-2014) and was appointed as Senior Professor in 2006. He has served the University of Zululand as Dean (1998-99), Vice-Dean (2007-2011), and Deputy Dean of Research and Internationalisation (2014-2019) in the Faculty of Arts. He graduated with a PhD (Leningrad/St Petersburg) in 1988 in the former Soviet Union. His research and teaching interests include information seeking, knowledge management, ICT4D, Data Science, bibliometrics /informetrics, information ethics and scholarly communication. He serves/has served on the editorial and peer review boards of many local and international journals, conferences and research organisations. He is currently (since 2009) the Editor-in-Chief of Inkanyiso: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences and before that, Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science (2002- 2008). He has received research awards including the NRF established researcher rating.

Alan Oliver

Alan Oliver is Business Development Director for the EMEA region at Ex Libris, a ProQuest Company. An experienced information professional, Alan has worked in libraries and in the library software business for more than 30 years.

 

 

 

 

Andrew Pace

Andrew leads a team of research scientists, architects, and engineers who track library and broader data science trends and is responsible for building a coordinated R&D strategy for OCLC Research. Previously, he directed the development of the WorldShare Platform, WorldShare Management Services, CONTENTdm, and several other library management applications. Prior to joining OCLC, Andrew was Head of Information Technology at North Carolina State University Libraries, where he spent nine years participating in several digital library projects. Andrew is a past president of the Library Information Technology Association (LITA, now Core), a division of ALA, and was a member of the ALA Executive Board from 2016-2019.

Jeremiah Pietersen

Jeremiah currently serves as the manager of Learning and Training at Stellenbosch University Library. In this capacity he manages both the Learning Commons and the Makerspace. Previously, he served in various capacities at the University of Cape Town; most recently as subject librarian for the Science Faculty. Jeremiah has an active interest in Digital Scholarship and Open Access.

 

 

Prof Kanshukan Rajaratnam

Prof Kanshukan Rajaratnam (@kanshuk) is the inaugural director of the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking (@SUDataSchool) at Stellenbosch University. He holds a BScEng in Chemical Engineering from UKZN, an MSc in Industrial Engineering from the National University of Singapore and a PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. His research interests are in the intersection of data science, operations research and banking/finance. His vision is to create a Data School that is sustainable and impactful.

 

 

Kate Robinson

A Theology graduate from the University of Manchester with a Masters in Library and Information Studies, Kate has worked in libraries since the 1980s; contributing to a range of sectors including public libraries, private members’ libraries and the advertising industry.  She is the University Librarian for the University of Bath, UK, and Vice-President of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals).  She chairs  the Sector Development Committee of CILIP and is a Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of University Libraries, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of CILIP.

Ujala Satgoor

Ms Ujala Satgoor is the Executive Director of the University of Cape Town Libraries, a position she has held since 2019. With over 25 years’ experience, she has fulfilled a leadership role on many national and international library and information services boards and committees during her career. These include a Board member of IATUL (2020-), Chair of the Committee of Higher Education Libraries in South Africa (2018-2020), LIASA President (2012-2014), Co-Chair of the 2015 IFLA WLIC National Committee, a member of the AfLIA Governing Board, a member of the IFLA Africa Section and a member of the Council on Higher Education Library and Information Services Reference Group. With several publications and presentations to her name, her experience includes grant proposal writing and management, library leadership development and effective strategy formulation. Ujala was named the first LIASA Executive Librarian of the Year in 2018.

Samuel Simango

Samuel Simango originally comes from a legal academic background. Upon completing his legal studies, he decided to pursue a career as a librarian. After initially starting out as a law librarian at the Library and Information Service of Stellenbosch University in 2014, he moved into the area of research data management and was appointed as the Manager: Research Data Services in 2017. Since then, he has been involved in several aspects relating to the governance, technology and services associated with research data management.

 

Dr Anwar Vahed

Dr Anwar Vahed is the director of the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA). He manages the implementation of a national research data infrastructure that supports data intensive research, and coordinates the development of relevant expertise and strategies, as well as the implementation of policies for research data management. DIRISA, together with the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and the South African Research Network (SANReN), comprises the technology component of the National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System of South Africa.

Anwar’s professional career spans leadership, managerial and capacity development roles in diverse academic, research and production ICT environments. He is a computer scientist with more than 20 years experience in academia, and in research and development in the fields of data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, artificial neural networks and research data management. He was Principal Researcher and the Research Group Leader of the ICT for Earth Observation Research Group at the CSIR and prior to joining the CSIR, he managed the data and information delivery systems of Statistics SA, and chaired the Department of Computer Science at the University of the Western Cape.

He has developed the national strategy for research Big Data, is review editor of data science journals and serves on several local and international committees in the data sciences, including the Research Data Alliance (RDA), US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and CODATA.

Laila Vahed

Laila Vahed is the Director of Library and Information Services at the University of Zululand, a position she has held since 2003. She holds a Master’s Degree in Information Studies from the University of Natal (UKZN), awarded in 1995. Currently Laila is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the South African Library and information Consortium (SANLiC), a position she has held since 2006. Laila also held portfolios in various other library structures over the years, including the Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) and the National Council for Library and Information Services (NCLIS). She also co-chaired the IFLA WLIC National Committee for the 2007 congress.

Laila is well known in LIASA circles and has become renowned for having served the organisation several times as its Electoral Officer, as well as assisting with constitutional matters for LIASA and other organisations. She was awarded the title of LIASA Librarian of the Year at the LIASA conference in October 2016.

Isak Van der Walt

Isak van der Walt is currently Digital Scholarship & Innovation Manager for the Department of Library Services at the University of Pretoria. He oversees the Digital Services and Systems unit which comprises of Digital Scholarship, Information Technology, Digitisation and the Library MakerSpace, his main focus is the implementation of projects that are of strategic value and importance to UP and Library Services. Isak has been a member of the University of Pretoria since 1999 where his career has been focused primarily on ICT and information services. With over 20 years of experience in the academic ICT sector, Isak has in-depth knowledge on the latest trends, demands and solutions to steer academic librarianship into the 21^st century. He is also a seasoned conference speaker having presented at over 50 conferences and workshops on national and international level.

Isak is co-founder and project lead of the first Academic MakerSpace in South Africa and responsible for the strategic planning and trajectory of the Makerspace. He is also responsible for the implementation of the first Robot Librarian, called Libby, in Africa. Currently Isak is in process of implementing a Digital Scholarship Centre at the University of Pretoria, enabling this new form of scholarly output and discovery for researchers and students. He is also part of the Research Data Management steering committee, advising on the technical aspects relating to RDM. In addition, Isak is also the Technical Lead for the South African Sustainable Development Hub (SASDGHub), steering their artificial intelligence project to enhance research discovery.

He is a passionate digital strategist with a love for all new disruptive technologies and services that change the very way we are doing things.

Prof Anton Van Niekerk

Anton van Niekerk is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University. He was one of the first distinguished professors appointed at Stellenbosch in 2014. He also, as a student (in 1980), received the Chancellor’s Medal for the best final year student on campus, as well as, in 2018, the Chancellor’s Award for his overall lifetime achievements as an academic. He has published more than 100 articles in accredited journals, as well as 20 books, 65 book chapters, 32 book reviews and more than 260 popular articles. Stellenbosch University invited him, on turning 65 in 2018, to prolong his term of office for another five years.