Biographies


Daniel Beeby serves the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning as Associate Director for Services and as an Educational Technologist. Primarily, he facilitates faculty partners' projects and works as the Center's representative to the CourseWorks development team.  Formerly, Mr. Beeby was the Technical Specialist for the Mellon Tri-College Language Project at Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore colleges where he worked with faculty on dozens of educational technology projects; offered presentations and workshops at numerous language conferences; and developed the "Makers" interactive-exercise creation tool.  Before that Mr. Beeby taught English at the Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania and German at Michigan State University. He is currently pursuing an advanced degree at Teachers College.

Kathleen M. Dreyer is Head of Columbia University's Watson Library of Business and Economics. In addition to providing research assistance to students and faculty, she manages the Watson Library and serves on various library-wide committees. Before coming to Columbia, Ms. Dreyer was a research librarian at the Lippincott Library at the University of Pennsylvania and a collections assistant at the Jack Brause Library at New York University. Ms. Dreyer holds an MLIS from Drexel University, College of Information Science and Technology, and is currently working toward an MA degree at Columbia University in the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program.

Marcel Fortin is the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Map Librarian at the University of Toronto. Mr. Fortin has a Masters degree in the History from the University of British Columbia, and a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario. His main research interest is in the use of GIS in historical research. He is a former president of the Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives. Mr. Fortin was recently featured in a Toronto Star newspaper article on the revival of cartography spurred on by web mapping tools.

Nancy Friedland is the librarian for Butler Media, Film Studies, and Performing Arts at Columbia University. Primarily, she serves as liaison to faculty and students in the School of the Arts. Ms. Friedland provides research assistance and instruction and selects a wide variety of materials in the subject areas of film and performing arts. She holds a MA from New York University and a MLS from Rutgers University and is currently serving on the Board of Theatre Library Association. She is a visiting associate professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science where she teaches courses in Advanced Reference and Film and Media Collections. Ms. Friedland is currently editing and contributing to a book on costume design and theatre, dance, and film.

Remlee Green is the Librarian for Web Technologies and Neuroscience in the Engineering and Science Libraries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ms. Green also serves as the Reference Coordinator for the MIT Science Library and the Chair of the MIT Libraries' Research and Instructional Support Group. She's currently the Chair Elect and Program Committee Chair for the New England Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (NEASIS&T). Ms. Green has an MLS from Simmons College.

Marjorie Hassen is Director of Public Services at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries where she is responsible for a broad array of programs including system-wide coordination of research and instructional services and oversight of the Weigle Information Commons, courseware services, and the ScholarlyCommons repository. Previously she has served as Assistant Director for Research and Instructional Services and as Head of the Otto E. Albrecht Music Library at Penn, and as Music Recordings Librarian at Princeton University. Ms. Hassen holds an AM degree in library science from the University of Chicago.

Sarah Holsted is the Digital Repository Coordinator in the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at the Columbia University Libraries. Ms. Holsted guides the growth and development of Academic Commons, Columbia’s research repository. She works with faculty, staff, and students to deposit digital items created through research and study into the online repository, and she collaborates with colleagues in CDRS and across the libraries to find innovative ways to manage, publish, and provide access to repository content. Before joining CDRS, Ms. Holsted consulted in the area of education technology and specifically on implementing, evaluating, conducting outreach for and promoting the sustainability of education digital libraries. Prior to establishing a consulting practice, Ms. Holsted worked in the private sector conducting market analyses and assessments related to deploying technology in higher education. She received a M.S.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Damon Jaggars is Associate University Librarian for Collections & Services at the Columbia University Libraries. Previous positions include Associate Director for User Services, Head Librarian, Undergraduate Library, and Head of Reference, Undergraduate Library, at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, and Coordinator of Information Technology at Iona College. Mr. Jaggars holds an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, Davis. Current research interests include service quality assessment and emerging service models for research and teaching support.

Nicholas Lemann, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, was born, raised and educated in New Orleans. He began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American History and Literature and was President of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation he worked at The Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as staff writer and then Washington Correspondent. On September 1, 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, at the end of a process of re-examination of the school's mission conducted by a national task force convened by the university's President, Lee C. Bollinger.
    Dean Lemann has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Slate, and American Heritage; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. Dean Lemann continues to write for The New Yorker, and serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Anice Mills is the Undergraduate Services Librarian in the Division of Humanities and History, Butler Library at Columbia University. She is the library liaison to the Core Curriculum at Columbia College. She earned her MLIS from the Palmer School of Library Science and holds an MA in History from the University of London. Prior to working at Columbia she worked in book publishing in New York City. Her current interest lies in innovative approaches to supporting the teaching and learning of undergraduate students.

Laine G.M. Ruus, Data Services Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries, has been "doing data" since 1974, at the University of British Columbia, the Swedish Social Science Data Service, and the University of Toronto. She has been a long-time and voluble member, and in some cases one of the founders, of data-related associations such as CCSR, IASSIST, CAPDU, and lately DINO. Passions include data access, data dissemination, and data preservation. A lately acquired MA in Sociology has contributed to adding issues of numeracy to her list of interests.

Anu Vedantham is the Director of the Weigle Information Commons at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her work at UPenn, Ms. Vedantham directed the Southern Regional Educational Technology Training Center (ETTC) at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey for six years providing professional development and technology models for college faculty and K-12 teachers. She also served as Interim Associate Provost and as Director of Instructional Technology. Her research on global warming has been recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) as a significant contribution to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Ms. Vedantham holds her New Jersey Principal Certificate and served for two years as Director of Grants and Community Initiatives at Stafford Township School District. In the mid-90s, Ms. Vedantham served as Program Officer at the Telecommunications Opportunities Program at the United States Department of Commerce. She completed her Masters in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and her Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is pursuing her doctorate in Higher Education Management at Penn's Graduate School of Education.

Mathew Willmott is the Library Liaison for Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Science Library, where he handles all outreach to the MIT Physics Department and collections work relating to physics and astronomy. He is also a member of the MIT Libraries' email reference service team and the five-person team supporting citation management software. In addition, Mr. Willmott writes puzzles for the MIT Libraries to use in campus-wide advertising campaigns. He holds BS degrees in Mathematics and Physics, with a minor in music, from MIT, and an MS degree in Mathematics from Northeastern University.