Speaker Profiles

John Carroll

John S. Carroll is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1963, after graduation from Haverford College, he became a reporter at the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin. Drafted, he served two years in the Army and then, in 1966, joined the Baltimore Sun as a local reporter. Later he was posted to Vietnam, the Middle East, and Washington. In 1973 he joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he served as night city editor, city editor and metropolitan editor. He became editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald (later the Herald-Leader) in 1979 and then, in 1991, returned to the Baltimore Sun as editor and vice president of the Times Mirror corporation. In 2000, he became editor of the Los Angeles Times, which won thirteen Pulitzer Prizes in his five-year tenure. He left the Times in August 2005 and became the Knight Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center, where he taught a course titled “Journalistic Values in a Time of Upheaval.”

Mr. Carroll is a recipient of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Benjamin Burton Memorial Award (2004). In 1971 and 1972, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and in 1988 he held a Visiting Journalist Fellowship at Oxford University. The National Press Foundation named him Editor of the Year in 1999. He served on the Pulitzer Prize board for nine years and was its chairman in 2002. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Mr. Carroll also has a longtime affiliation with the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He currently lives in Kentucky with his wife, Lee, and is writing a book.

Debora Cheney

Debora Cheney is The Larry and Ellen Foster Communications Librarian and Head, The News and Microforms Libraries at The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. As the Larry and Ellen Foster Librarian, she works closely with the faculty and students in Penn State’s communications majors, including journalism and media studies. As head of the News and Microforms Library, her work has focused on the challenges large academic libraries face in providing access to news content for teaching and research and the role of libraries in providing access to content that is increasingly electronic and delivered via the Internet. She has coauthored articles on teaching students how to use libraries and information in Portal and Journal of Academic Librarianship and on how libraries can provide access to converging news forms in College and Research Libraries.

David S. Ferriero

In a career spanning more than four decades, David S. Ferriero has served with distinction as a top executive at two of the nation’s greatest academic libraries: MIT and Duke University. In those positions, he led major initiatives encompassing the expansion of facilities, the adoption of digital technologies, and a reengineering of printing and publications. This wide-ranging experience has served him well at the New York Public Library, where he was recently promoted to the newly created position of Andrew W. Mellon Director of The New York Public Libraries. As the Mellon Director, Mr. Ferriero’s charge is to transform the world-renowned system—encompassing four research libraries and 87 branch libraries—into a completely integrated whole that provides seamless service for its millions of users.

Mr. Ferriero joined the staff of the New York Public Library in 2004 as the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries. In this capacity, he oversaw The Humanities and Social Sciences Library, which occupies the Beaux-Arts landmark at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street; The Science, Industry, and Business Library; The Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem. In his new position, Mr. Ferriero is unifying these great centers of research with the branch libraries that are a fundamental part of every neighborhood in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. He is also responsible for overseeing the development of the New York Public Library’s digital strategy, which currently encompasses partnerships with Google and Microsoft, a Web site that reaches more than 25 million unique users annually, and a digital library of more than 600,000 images that may be accessed free of charge by users around the world.

Mr. Ferriero earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from Northeastern University, and an M.S. from the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Following service in the Navy in Vietnam, he pursued his passion for books by embarking on a library career, beginning as a shelver in the Humanities Library at MIT. He was later appointed Associate Director for Public Services and Acting Co-Director of Libraries. In total, he served for 31 years at MIT.

As the Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke, Mr. Ferriero administered the University’s Perkins Library system, comprising eight libraries and a state-of-the-art shelving facility. In his eight-year tenure at Duke, Mr. Ferriero oversaw the planning of a major expansion and renovation of the Library, which launched in summer 2003. Credited by the University’s President as “a remarkably effective and visionary leader,” he dramatically improved the delivery of information services that support the teaching and research needs of the members of the Duke community as well as the international community of scholars. Working closely with the University's Chief Information Officer, Mr. Ferriero was responsible for instructional technology initiatives, which included overseeing the Center for Instructional Technology. In short, he brought the Duke libraries into the electronic age.

A lifelong reader and classical music enthusiast, Mr. Ferriero brings to bear a relaxed charm and razor-sharp wit to his job. These qualities, combined with his exceptional professional accomplishments, will be critical as he plays a major role in leading the New York Public Library through a major transformation that will impact its users for many years to come.

Denise Hibay

Denise Hibay began her career at The New York Public Library more than twenty years ago. She has held positions as reference librarian, collection development librarian for Latin America, Spain and Portugal, and most recently, as coordinator of the general humanities and social sciences collection. Currently she serves as the Interim Director for Collections Strategy leading work on an overall assessment of NYPL’s research collections and the integration and coordination of its research and branch collecting activities. She received an M.L.S. from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University. She is also a Visiting Associate Professor in Pratt Institute’s School of Library and Information Science teaching courses on digital collections and services in libraries, and databases in the humanities and social sciences.

Valerie Komor

Valerie Komor has been Director of the Associated Press Corporate Archives since 2003. Previously, she was head of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections at the New-York Historical Society (2000–03), and Supervisory Archivist at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (1996–2000). She has also held positions at the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Oberlin College Archives. She received an M.A. in Medieval Studies from Yale University and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Texas at Austin. From 1987 to 1988, she was a Fulbright scholar in Italy, where she studied the journalism and novels of Neapolitan writer Matilde Serao.

Andrew Madden

Andrew Madden is a member of Google’s Content Partnerships team, with a focus on newspaper publishers, magazine groups, and content aggregators. He has worked at the intersection of media and the Internet for over ten years, starting as a writer and editor at Red Herring, a monthly magazine about the business of technology. His writing has also appeared in Nasdaq International Magazine, Wired, and the M.I.T. Technology Review, where he was a contributing editor. Mr. Madden also launched his own integrated new media company and did stints at CNET News.com, where he was director of editorial projects, and at KeepMedia, an online aggregator of magazine and newspaper archives, where he was a member of the management team. Andrew is a graduate of Princeton University. He joined Google in June 2005.

Victoria McCargar

Victoria McCargar is a veteran journalist and digital archivist who spent 12 of her 25 years at the Los Angeles Times in news access and database projects. She has contributed research to InterPARES, PREMIS, and TRAC, and has consulted on digital preservation and curation projects for the Annenberg Foundation, University of Missouri School of Journalism, National Public Radio, Center for Research Libraries, and Associated Press.

Bernard F. Reilly

Bernard F. Reilly is President of the Center for Research Libraries, a partnership of 245 U.S. and Canadian universities, colleges and independent research libraries. Reilly was principal investigator for two digital preservation projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the Political Communications Web Archiving Investigation (2002–04) and the Auditing and Certification of Digital Archives project.

Mr. Reilly was previously Director of Research and Access at the Chicago History Museum (1997–2001), where he directed digitization and dissemination of the CHM library, archives, and architecture, audio, television, and pictorial collections. He was Head of the Curatorial Section in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress (1987–97), which provided curatorial and policy support to the early development of the National Digital Library.

Gary Sick

Gary Sick served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis and is the author of two books on U.S.-Iranian relations. Mr. Sick is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy, with service in the Persian Gulf, North Africa and the Mediterranean. He was the deputy director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1982 to 1987, where he was responsible for programs relating to U.S. foreign policy.

Mr. Sick has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, where he is Senior Research Scholar, adjunct professor of international affairs and former director of the Middle East Institute (2000–03). He is the executive director of Gulf/2000, an international research project on political, economic and security developments in the Persian Gulf, being conducted at Columbia University with support from a number of major foundations. He is coeditor of four books on the Persian Gulf, published by the Gulf/2000 project and Palgrave (formerly St Martin’s) Press in New York. Mr. Sick is a member (emeritus) of the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and founding chairman of its Middle East and North Africa advisory committee.

James Simon

James Simon is Director of International Resources at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, Illinois. He is also the director of the Global Resources Network, a collaborative initiative of the major North American universities and research libraries to promote the widespread availability and exchange of knowledge and source materials for international studies. Simon is responsible for the coordination of such CRL programs as the Digital South Asia Library, the International Coalition on Newspapers, and the Area Studies Microform projects. Prior to his appointment in 1998, Simon worked in Washington, D.C., for the International Research & Exchanges Board, where he was Program Officer for scholarly exchanges and cooperative partnerships with Russian and Slavic organizations.

Sree Sreenivasan

Sree Sreenivasan is a journalism educator, technology expert and freelance journalist and blogger. He is Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia University's journalism school, where he runs the new media program. He also serves as technology reporter for WNBC-TV in NYC (Thursdays at 6:20 a.m. and Mondays at 5:20 p.m.) and contributing occasionally to various NBC News programs (he previously spent six years as WABC’s Tech Guru). His work explaining technology has appeared in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science. He is cofounder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association, a group of 1,000+ journalists across the U.S. and Canada, and has been a keen watcher of U.S.-South Asia affairs for more than 15 years. In March 2004, Newsweek magazine named him one of the 20 most influential South Asians in the nation and in July 2007, India Abroad named him one of the 50 most influential Indians in America. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Roopa Unnikrishnan (a business strategist and world-class sports rifle shooter), and their twin toddlers. More on his work at www.sree.net.

Katrina Stierholz

Katrina Stierholz joined the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2002. She is the Research Information Officer, heading up the Bank’s research library and the Center for Economic Documents Digitization (which has created the FRASER Web site). The research library produces the Liber8 website, an economic information portal for librarians and students, and its accompanying newsletter. Ms. Stierholz is also responsible for the data desk, which posts the data that is on the Economic Research Web site of the St. Louis Fed (FRED). Prior to joining the Federal Reserve, Ms. Stierholz was at the Washington University School of Law Library.