OpenAthens Conference 2018

Championing the user

22 March 2018

The British Library, London, UK

OpenAthens conference 2018

About

The 2018 conference theme ‘Championing the user’ reflects the challenges
we all face in providing users with secure, simple access to digital content.

Topics ranged from user-centered design and measuring user access
and engagement to data protection, security and piracy.

Guest speakers included:

William Bowes, Director of Policy and General Counsel, The Publishers Association
Don Thibeau, Chief Executive, OpenID Foundation
Torsten Reimer, Head of Research Services, The British Library

“Topics and talks were relevant and interesting.” “The program was very topical, some good speakers and plenty of time for networking.” “Excellent value for money, fantastic location and facilities and the speakers were interesting.”

Delegate feedback from 2018 OpenAthens Conference

Speakers

William Bowes

William Bowes

William Bowes is Director of Policy and General Counsel at the Publishers Association, the trade association representing book, journal, audio and electronic publishers in the UK. In this role, William is responsible for the Policy, Legal, Research and Public Affairs output and leads all interactions with Government and Regulators both in the UK and other countries. William is a qualified lawyer with a particular specialism in copyright. After qualifying and working in private practice, he subsequently worked as an in house counsel for Publishers covering the full range of consumer, professional and scholarly publishing including most recently serving as the General Counsel for the world’s oldest publisher, Cambridge University Press. He is a regular writer and speaker on issues relating to copyright and the role of Publishing in society with recent talks taking place in Oxford, Cambridge, Brussels, London, Frankfurt and New Delhi.

Don Thibeau

Don Thibeau

Don is President and Chairman of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX), a non-profit, technology agnostic, organization of global leaders from the private and public sectors. OIX is a test bed for business, legal and governance best practices and policies and operates the OIXnet registry. Don is Chairman of OIX UK/Europe and the Co-Chair of the OASIS Electronic Identity Credential Trust Elevation Methods (Trust Elevation) Technical Committee.  

Don is also the Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation, a standards development organization. The foundation’s membership includes leaders from across industry sectors and governments that collaborate on the development, adoption and deployment of open identity standards. Don blogs at donthibeau.com.

Torsten Reimer

Torsten Reimer

Dr Torsten Reimer is Head of Research Services at the British Library. He is leading a transformation of the Library’s service offering, including the contemporary collections, online and onsite services, to researchers and research organisations. Before joining the Library in 2016, he was responsible for developing and implementing the scholarly communications strategy at Imperial College London. Torsten has a background in digital humanities and scholarly communications, having held positions in this area at the University of Munich and King’s College London, and has worked extensively on digital infrastructure for research and education, for example as programme manager at Jisc.

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Trevor Hough

Within the role of Service and Support Coordinator at the University of Leeds, Trevor looks after access to the online resources provided to academics and students via the Library, including authentication. He has recently been involved in the University’s move from Shibboleth to OpenAthens.

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Dr Sandra Tury

Sandra is currently Head of Library Services at the University of London International Programmes (Senate House) where she has worked in various roles since 2005 including Head of e-resources and Reference Services for the University of London’s Senate House Library. Sandra has extensive experience (over 20 years) of managing, developing and implementing library information systems, including authentication and resource discovery solutions, and has been an OpenAthens administrator since 1998. She was also part of the team which implemented Shibboleth and upgraded to OpenAthens at the University of London in 2009. She is very passionate about the User Experience and in particular the Distance Learners’ experience.

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Catherine Micklethwaite

As the Library Manager at Torbay & South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, Catherine performs the role of administrator for NHS OpenAthens accounts in the South West region and is a member of the national NHS OpenAthens administration group. She has recently undertaken research on the future of resource discovery for NHS staff and the role authentication systems play in this. Being relatively new to this sector, Catherine had to adjust to the realities of NHS information systems and requirements.

Tim Lull

Tim Lull

Tim Lull has worked at EBSCO Information Services (EIS) in Ipswich, MA for 9 years. In that time, he has held various roles from Technical Support to Sales Management. Most recently, Tim’s main area of focus has been on maturing EBSCO’s products by increasing the integration and interoperability with all library software. This involves helping to manage and grow the partnerships that surround those opportunities – including Stacks and OpenAthens. Authentication, and the way forward around that, has been a key focus for EBSCO, and helped with OpenAthens. This is critical because it’s well understood that the key to the user experience, and “championing the user” is to ease the burden of access. Tim will be presenting with Kristin Delwo, of Stacks Inc., and they will lead their discussion around improving the user experience via content aggregation, authentication, and delivery.

Kristin Delwo

Kristin Delwo

Kristin Delwo, President & CEO, is focused on finding new and better ways to conduct business. She strives to improve efficiencies and make an impact on bottom lines and service delivery through today’s mobile technologies. She has been leading award-winning enterprise-scale projects for clients with a team of talented designers, programmers, engineers and software architects. As a former Public Library Manager and Systems Administrator for a large multi-type Consortia with over 10 years of experience managing library projects, Kristin knows first-hand the challenges libraries face and has built her business around creating solutions that are sustainable, affordable and accessible.

Richard Northover

Richard Northover

Richard Northover is Product Director of Identity at Elsevier. Before he joined Elsevier in 2015, he spent 10 years at the BBC as a web developer and product manager, helping to build the sign in system for bbc.co.uk, and working on accessibility, privacy and user data strategy. He has a background in biology and science journalism, and has spent his fair share of time trying to access things in university libraries.

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Tasha Mellins-Cohen

An active participant in the scholarly publishing community, Tasha is a member of the COUNTER Executive and of the UKSG Education Committee. Her industry expertise stretches from publishing operations and project management to policy setting, via technology management and business analysis.

Kristina Botyriute

Kristina Botyriute

Kristina Botyriute is an International Technical Pre-Sales Consultant for OpenAthens and author of ‘Access to online resources: A guide for the modern librarian’ with the determined mission to make the librarian’s job easier.

Daily interactions with libraries across a variety of environments all over the globe has allowed Kristina to help librarians achieve their goals, through bridging the gap between technical and non-technical roles with a mix of expert knowledge and no nonsense approach.

Jon Bentley

Jon Bentley

Jon has worked in publishing for 20 years with a variety of commercial and business publishers. His career has spanned the transformation from print to digital as companies have reacted and adapted to new technology. But his belief remains that the fundamental purpose of a publisher hasn’t changed. Accessibility to accurate, intelligent, insightful information has never been more important. Trust is paramount and Jon is delighted that OpenAthens participates in establishing that trust between the publishers, libraries and the end users.

mike brooksbank

Mike Brooksbank

Mike joined Eduserv in March 2015 as Executive Director, responsible for OpenAthens. Prior to OpenAthens Mike held a number or senior commercial roles in technology-centric businesses, he has directed and run international software and SaaS operations in the United States, the Asia Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Under his direction the OpenAthens business has been reshaped and truly established internationally; Mike became Chief Commercial Officer of Eduserv in January 2017.

Adam Snook

Adam Snook

Adam is an experienced Technical Product Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Incident Management, Service Delivery, Technical Support, Customer Service and working in an Agile/Scrum environment.

Neil Scully

Neil Scully

Neil has responsibility for leading the Development, Service and Technical Pre-Sales teams. He has lead the team through the program of modernising OpenAthens, having overseen the redevelopment of key parts of the service and the migration of the infrastructure to the CCI platform. He has implemented agile practices to increase the productivity of the Development Team and is currently moving the team towards adoption of DevOps practices. He has a wide range of management and leadership skills and vast experience of running technical teams.

Andy Anderson

Andy Anderson

A self-proclaimed renaissance geek with qualifications in Training, QA, and Licensed Victualling, Andy has bought a unique perspective to OpenAthens. About his current role he says: “If I’d known I’d be using my O Level in Statistics this much, I’d have paid more attention in class”.

David Orrell

David Orrell

David is an experienced Software Architect and expert in federated Identity and security-related architectures such as PKI, Certification Authorities, SSL/TLS and federation standards such as SAML, OpenID Connect and OAuth. David has presented at several national and international conferences and working groups (including the TERENA Task Force on European Middleware Coordination and Collaboration) in the areas of authentication, single sign-on and security. He also worked with and advised government bodies, on security and middleware.

Martyn Jansen

Martyn Jansen

For ten years Martyn has provided the legal and contracts support to all Eduserv’s lines of business. He has 20+ years’ experience successfully drafting, negotiating and managing sale and procurement contracts in engineering and IT in public and private sectors in the UK and overseas. Martyn has worked for start ups and also the UK’s largest companies. Helped develop the original NEC contract. Commercial manager for ICL’s Prestige project with London Underground which spawned the Oyster card. Similar role on BT’s 21C fibre to the home project which led to BT Infinity being established. Central role in the leading UK contract law case. Extensive general management experience and board exposure.

Speaker at a podium - OpenAthens Conference 2018
OpenAthens 2018 sponsor logos including: LM information delivery, TDNet, BBC Publications, EBSCO, SirsiDynix, Chest, Stacks

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