Michael Lesk's Grade Crossing on the Information Superhighway


Professional       Amateur        Coin-operated

See my book Understanding Digital Libraries: Second Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, December 2004.

Position: Professor, Rutgers University, and Chair, Department of Library and Information Science.

Biography

In the 1960's I worked for the SMART project, wrote much of their retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a PhD in Chemical Physics. In the 1970's I worked in the group that built Unix and I wrote Unix tools for word processing (tbl, refer), compiling (lex), and networking (uucp). In the 1980's I worked on specific information systems applications, mostly with geography (a system for driving directions) and dictionaries (a system for disambiguating words in context), as well as running a research group at Bellcore. And in the 1990s I have worked on a large chemical information system, the CORE project, with Cornell, OCLC, ACS and CAS. From 1998-2002 I was head of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Currently I am on the faculty of the Library and Information Science Department, SCILS (School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies), Rutgers University. I received the ``Flame'' award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, I am a Fellow of the ACM, and in 2005 I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. You can read my publication list if you wish.

Where?

Michael Lesk
Rm 306, SCILS
Rutgers University
4 Huntington St
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
732-932-7500 ext. 8230
lesk@acm.org

Rutgers students: class webpages for Information Policy and for older classes LIS 553 and LIS 556.
If you're looking for the copyright renewal records, look at http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html.

Interests

Digital Libraries               Library preservation

Information Retrieval          Networks & Misc.


Places I have lived


New Jersey . . Brooklyn. . . . . . Cambridge, Mass. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . London
. . . . . . . . . . . . . transport

Talks in UK: Cyberinfrastructure talk; Million-Book.

lesk@bellcore.com Michael Lesk
Last changed: 25 March 2005