Speakers’ Profiles
Dr Christine Fitton – Lifelong Learning UK
Dr Christine Fitton is the National Manager for Scotland for the sector skills council, Lifelong Learning UK (LLUK). LLUK includes staff who work in libraries, archives and information services. A qualified teacher, she worked in Scotland’s colleges for 17 years before moving to local government where she ran the education department International Unit. She built strong links with colleagues working in community learning and development, as well as an extensive network of international partners.
Before joining LLUK, Christine managed Edinburgh’s Lifelong Learning Partnership, a charitable company promoting joint working by the lifelong learning sector to push forward the learning and social inclusion, including digital inclusion, agendas.
Chris Fletcher - BT Lynx
Chris Fletcher is a Solution Architect with BT Lynx. His twenty years of professional experience with blue chip organizations has included both technical and managerial roles. This knowledge, coupled with his enormous propensity towards new technologies and their corporate strategic impact, is used to help organisations gain the most from their investments in information technologies. He now specializes in Microsoft’s document management and collaboration solution (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), Information Architectures and their relationship to user adoption and engagement.
Dr Sarah Pedersen - RGU
Dr Sarah Pedersen is the Course Leader of MSc Publishing Studies and MSc Publishing with Journalism at The Robert Gordon University. Her research interests cover the areas of women and media and computer-mediated communication. Her PhD thesis investigated women correspondents’ use of local daily newspapers in Edwardian Scotland and the way in which women used the letters pages to discuss social and political issues of the day. More recently, her work has focused on women’s use of blogging,where she has found many similarities with the earlier use of newspaper letter columns. In 2006 she was awarded an AHRC research leave grant to investigate differences between the motivations of UK and US bloggers. She is the Chair of the UK Association for Publishing Education.
Lawrie Phipps - JISC
Lawrie Phipps is a Programme Manager working for the Joint Information Systems Committee. His programme, Users and Innovation is creating opportunities to transform practice by developing technologies and innovative processes based on the needs of individual users working within institutions across multiple domains (for example, administration and research, teaching and information systems, and research and teaching). Lawrie formerly worked for and set up the JISC TechDis service, supporting the needs of disabled students through the use of Technology; and he also worked for the LTSN Subject Centre (now HEA) for Geography, Earth and
Environmental Sciences.
Peter Ramsden – Life Long Learning UK
Peter Ramsden is a chartered librarian with twenty years experience of working in libraries. He has worked on a number of training and accreditation projects, and has been an assessor and verifier for the S/NVQs in Information and Library Services. Peter is now a member of the Standards and Qualifications team at Lifelong Learning UK, where he is leading the work on developing new occupational standards and new vocational qualifications for the information workforce in the UK.
Richard Wallis - Talis
Richard is Technology Evangelist at Talis. His thirty year plus career in the computer information industry, the last fifteen of which has been with the UK’s leading Library Systems Vendor, Talis, coupled with his passion for and involvement with new and emerging technology trends, gives him a unique perspective of the issues challenging Libraries today. Richard has been ‘in at the birth’ of several major Library System Developments, as architect, research and technical lead. More recently as Technology Evangelist he has been at the forefront in promoting, explaining, and applying new and emerging Web technologies in the library and information domain. Richard is an active blogger on both Panlibus & Talis Developer Network and a regular podcaster in the Talking with Talis series.
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