Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, C.B.E.

David Puttnam spent thirty years as an independent producer of award-winning films including The Mission, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Bugsy Malone and Memphis Belle. His films have won ten Oscar’s, 25 Bafta’s and the Palme D’Or at Cannes.

From 1994 to 2004 he was Vice President and Chair of Trustees at the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) and was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship in 2006.

He retired from film production in 1998 to focus on his work in public policy as it relates to education, the environment, and the ‘creative and communications’ industries. In 1998 he founded the National Teaching Awards, which he chaired until 2008, also serving as the first Chair of the General Teaching Council from 2000 to 2002. From July 2002 to July 2009 he was president of UNICEF UK, playing a key role in promoting UNICEF’s key advocacy and awareness objectives.

David is the present Chancellor of the Open University, following ten years as Chancellor of The University of Sunderland. He is President of the Film Distributors’ Association, Chairman of The Sage Gateshead, Deputy Chairman of Channel Four, Deputy Chairman of Profero and a trustee of the Eden Project.

He was founding Chair of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and for ten years chaired the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. He has also served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and the Science Museum.

In 2007 he served as Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill, having performed the same role on the 2002 Communications Bill. He has also been Chairman of two Hansard Society Commission Reports on the relationship between Parliament and the Public; he serves as Senior Non-Executive Director on two public companies.

David was awarded a CBE in 1982, a knighthood in 1995 and was appointed to the House of Lords in 1997. In France he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1985, becoming an Officer in 1992, and a Commander in 2006. He has been the recipient of more than 40 honorary degrees from Universities in the UK and overseas.

Tara Brabazon

Tara Brabazon is Professor of Communication in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA).

Previously, Tara has held academic positions in the United Kingdom, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. An outstanding teacher, she won six teaching awards, including the Australian National Teaching Award for the Humanities in 1998, along with others in the areas of disability and cultural studies. In 2005, Tara won both the Murdoch University Postgraduate Supervisor of the Year and the Teaching Excellence Award. In 2009 and she won the University of Brighton’s Teaching Excellence Award, nominated by both undergraduate and postgraduate students. She was a finalist for the 2005 Australian of the Year and also the 2005 Telstra Businesswoman of the Year in the Community Service category. In 1999 and 2002, she was short-listed for the Western Australian Citizen of the Year.

Tara’s best known research is in the areas of online education and media literacies, popular cultural studies, creative industries and city imaging and sonic media. At the moment, Tara is running three clustered research projects. Firstly, she is continuing her research into online education. The current manifestation of this work, following her two books Digital Hemlock and The University of Google, is titled Digital Dieting: moving from information obesity to digital fitness. Her second area of research explores orality, aurality and sonic media, investigating the role of sound-only media in creating political defamiliarization and social change. Tara’s third sphere of research connects her interest in city imaging and social media to explore how geosocial networking, through such applications as FourSquare and Groupon, can become part of a strategy for urban regeneration and social development. Downtown Oshawa is an important case study for this research.

Megan Oakleaf

Megan Oakleaf is an Assistant Professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University where she teaches “Reference and Information Literacy Services” and “Planning, Marketing, and Assessing Library Services.” Her research interests include library value and impact, outcomes assessment, evidence-based decision making, information literacy instruction, information services, and digital librarianship. She is the author of the Value of Academic Libraries Comprehensive Report and Review and is on the faculty of the ACRL Immersion Program.

Megan has presented at numerous conferences, including ALA, ACRL, and AAC&U National Conferences, ARL Library Assessment Conferences, the IUPUI Assessment Institute, the NCSU Undergraduate Assessment Symposium, the Texas A&M Assessment Conference, and EDUCAUSE. Megan won the 2011 Ilene F. Rockman Publication of the Year Award, was named to the LIRT Top 20 Instruction Articles three times, was included on the 2010 Reference Research Review List, and was awarded “Best Paper” at the 2007 EBLIP Conference. She has published articles in JASIST, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Documentation, Communications in Information Literacy, Library Quarterly, and Portal, among other journals.

Previously, Megan was the Librarian for Instruction and Undergraduate Research at North Carolina State University. In this role, she designed, implemented, coordinated, and assessed the library instruction program. She trained fellow librarians in instructional theory and methods; spearheaded development of the LOBO tutorial, a modular information literacy tutorial for first-year students and winner of the ALA/Information Today “Library of the Future” Award; served on the Committee on Undergraduate Education; and provided library instruction to the First Year Writing Program, First Year College, Honors Program, and Department of Communication.

Megan completed her dissertation entitled, “Assessing Information Literacy Skills: A Rubric Approach,” at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her MLS from Kent State University and also holds a BA in English and Spanish and a BS in English Education and Spanish Education from Miami University. Prior to a career in librarianship, Megan taught language arts and advanced composition in Ohio public schools, grades 8-12.

David Nicholas

David is Director of the Department of Information Studies at University College London, London’s I-School and the biggest information school in the UK. He is also the Director of the UCL Centre for Publishing and the CIBER research group. Previously, he was Head of the Department of Information

Science, City University. Research interests largely concern mapping behaviour in virtual spaces, the virtual scholar, and the Google Generation.

Together with Al Gore, Stephen Fry and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (amongst others) he (and CIBER) had a starring role in the BBC’s Television Series, The Virtual Revolution (http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/)

Nikki Heath

Nikki Heath has been working in libraries since the age of 11. She has a BA (Hons) in Library and Information Studies, and has worked in college, public, school and school library service libraries over the past 27 years.

Passionate about encouraging reading for pleasure, Nikki works with a great team of staff at Werneth School in Stockport to get students reading in unusual and different ways. She teaches fortnightly library lessons for all year sevens and eights, combining Information Literacy with the Accelerated Reader programme.

Nikki was Awarded the title of School Librarian of the Year in 2008 and is currently an SLA committee member.

Jesus Lau

Co-author of the Mexican Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education, author of the IFLA International Guidelines on Information Literacy for Life-Long Learning now available in seven languages, editor of the just released book Information Literacy: International Perspectives (K.G.Saur), and published other books and papers, including the co-authored (Ralph Catts) Towards Information Literacy Indicators: A Conceptual Framework Paper”, written for and published by UNESCO, 2008.  Coordinator of the UNESCO-funded projects of InfoLit/IFLA: a) the web-based International Information Literacy Resources Directory, b) the International Information Literacy State of the Art Report, and also coordinator of the c) IL International Logo Contest, all available at http://www.infolitglobal.info/. He is Director of the University of Veracruz (Universidad Veracruzana) / USBI Library and Coordinator of the UV Virtual Library in Veracruz, México. He has a Master’s Degree in Library Science at Denver University and has a Ph.D. in Information Science from Sheffield University, England.