Indian Americans named to digital task force

G Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean of libraries at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, and Dr Vijay Gurbaxani, senior associate dean, the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California at Irvine, have been named to the Blue Ribbon Task Force on a Sustainable Digital Future.

The 16-member task force is an international team that will address a key challenge of the Information Age -- economic models for preserving and accessing digital data for future generations.

The team was launched by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the United Kingdom, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Their assigned two-year mission is to develop a viable economic sustainability strategy to ensure that today's data will be available for further use, analysis and study.

'With literally every 'bit' of information now being digitally processed and stored, our computer-centric society is faced with one of the greatest challenges of our time: how best to preserve and efficiently access these vast amounts of digital data well into the future and do so in an economically sustainable manner.'

'NSF and other organizations, both national and international, are funding research programs to address these technical and cyber-infrastructure issues,' said Lucy Nowell, program director for the Office of Cyber-infrastructure at the NSF, in announcing the members of the task force.

'This is the only group I know of that is chartered to help us understand the economic issues surrounding sustainable repositories and identify candidate solutions.'

Choudhury, who is also Hodson director, Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins, serves as principal investigator for projects funded through the NSF, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Mellon Foundation.

He has oversight for the digital library activities and services provided by the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins. He has published numerous articles in the International Journal of Digital Curation, D-Lib, the Journal of Digital Information and First Monday.

Dr Gurbaxani is also professor of business and computer science at the Paul Merage School of Business and director of the Center for Research on IT and Organizations, an NSF-sponsored think tank that partners with innovative organizations to conduct and disseminate research that is both academically rigorous and relevant to business.

Dr Gurbaxani has been a visiting scholar at the business schools at Stanford University and MIT. He served as associate dean of the MBA programs from 1995 to 1999 and from 2004 to 2006. He is author of the book Managing Information Systems Business Costs, and has published numerous articles in leading journals including Information Systems Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, and Sloan Management Review.

He received a Masters' degree in mathematics and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, and master's and PhD degrees in business administration from the William E Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester, New York.