Biography:
Lee Dirks is the Director of Education & Scholarly Communications in Microsoft’s External Research division, where he manages a variety of research programs related to open access to research data, interoperability of archives and repositories, preservation of digital information as well as the application of new technologies to facilitate teaching and learning in higher education.
A 20+ year veteran across multiple information management fields, Lee holds an M.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as well as a post-masters degree in Preservation Administration from Columbia University. In addition to past positions at Columbia and with OCLC (Preservation Resources), Lee has held a variety of roles at Microsoft since joining the company in 1996 - namely as the corporate archivist, then corporate librarian, and as a senior manager in the corporate market research organization. During his career, his team's work on the http://library intranet site at Microsoft was recognized as a "Center of Excellence Award for Technology" in 2003 by the Special Library Association's (SLA) Business & Finance Division. Additionally, Lee was presented the 2006 Microsoft Marketing Excellence Award by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer – for a marketing & engineering partnership around a breakthrough market opportunity analysis process which is now a standard operating procedure across Microsoft.
In addition to participation on several (US) National Science Foundation task forces, Lee also teaches as adjunct faculty at the iSchool at the University of Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the University of Washington Libraries, the UW iSchool's Master of Science in Information Science (MSIM) program, and the Metadata Research Center (MRC) at the School of Information and Library Science at UNC—Chapel Hill.
Recent Presentations:
Presentations at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) on 11/9/09:
eResearch Australasia 2009 in Sydney, Australia on 11/11/09
University of Washington Open Access Week (Panel Discussion) in Seattle, WA on 10/22/09
Berkman Center At Harvard University in Cambridge, MA on 9/19/09
Recent Publications:
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery (Microsoft Research, 2009) - a collection of essays expanding on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray -- for a new paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science
"The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications and Cyberinfrastructure" in Cybertechnology Watch Quarterly - Vol. 3 No. 3 (August 2007)
