Spanish Fulbright Scholar to Present at Spring Research Forum

Dr. Eva Mendez will discuss the current states of metadata standards for
describing and organizing digital learning objects, the practice of European
higher education community, and address the challenges and new perspectives
for digital libraries and services.

WHAT: SIS Research Forum with Dr. Eva Méndez

WHEN: Wednesday, April, 19, 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.

WHERE: Rm. 258 Hodges Library Faculty Lounge

Also visit the SIS Research Forums website.

Title: Information systems and services to educate life-long
learners: A chance for metadata research

Abstract: The Bologna Declaration established a changing process
in European higher education, which demands new, robust, and more efficient
digital information systems. Those new information systems should assist in
evolving educational systems based on the student workload required to
achieve the objectives of an academic program. Modern life-long learning,
especially through the medium of eLearning or online educational systems,
requires a flexible technological infrastructure such as this to organize
learning centered on the needs of individual students.

Current status of these show us that the international e-learning
community are embracing many modern Web technologies, including XML, RDF,
metadata and other vocabularies to describe and manage learning objects or
digital education resources. The educational technology standardization
movement has also grown to become a significant force, including such
organizations as IMS Global Learning Consortium, LOM/IEEE, Dublin Core
(DCMI) and Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), which are standardizing
important base technologies for e-learning applications.

This presentation will cover all of these changes in the particular
context of European Space of Higher Education construction, as well as the
new perspectives and challenges for digital libraries, digital services,
digital repositories… etc., involving both new patterns for educational
innovation and standardization, and new information literacy, where Web
technologies have a main role to assure the Information Society principle of
life-long learning, tacitly recognized in the Bologna Declaration.

Presenter Bio

Dr. Eva Méndez is an Assistant Professor at the University Carlos III of
Madrid, where she has been employed as a teacher and researcher since March
1997. She holds a PhD (cum laude) in Information Science from the same
University, awarded in the academic year 2001-2002 as the outstanding thesis
of the year in that field.

As well as the book, Metadatos y Recuperación de información:
estándares, problemas y aplicabilidad en bibliotecas digitales (Trea,
2002), she has authored or co-authored over 25 academic papers, principally
in the areas of metadata, digital information management and accessibility
in Web environments and digital libraries. She has been teaching at four
Ph.D. programs and five masters, supervising students’ projects, spending
time as a visiting Professor in four Universities, and further work as an
external consultant in the area of educational technology at the UTN in
Argentina. She has taught more that 60 specialization courses in Spain and
in other countries.

Dr. Méndez has lead or participated in different research projects; in
addition she has consulted on an ad hoc basis in many countries, notably on
DLs and metadata founded by the National Bank of the Republic of Columbia,
and on metadata and content management for the European Urban Knowledge
Network (EUKN). She is currently advisor on Information policies for the
President of the Dominican Republic.

Dr. Méndez has acted as a member of the scientific committee for
conferences such as the Congreso Internacional de Información INFO (Cuba,
2002 y 2004), Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems
(EATIS 2006) and the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata
Applications (Shanghai, 2004, Colima, Mx 2006), program committee chair in
2005 Conference in Madrid. She is a member of various working and research
groups such as the Comité 50 of the Agencia Española de Normalización
(AENOR), Louis Round Wilson Academy-Knowledge Trust, the DCMI Advisory
Board, and NormaWeb, and in these and similar roles has organized various
presentations, conferences and courses for information professionals on
various aspects of the Web.

She is currently a Fulbright-European Union Research Scholar in the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at Metadata Research Center,
from October 2005 to June 2006.