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About the Speaker

Kurt De Belder is University Librarian at Leiden University, Director of Leiden University Libraries and of Leiden University Press. Leiden University is the oldest and foremost university in the Netherlands founded in 1575. Leiden University Library is famous for its unique and internationally oriented special collections and for its role as a cultural center that gave direction to the development and spread of knowledge during the Enlightenment. Previously, Kurt worked at the university libraries of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University.

Kurt serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources; the Executive Board of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries; the Board of Directors of OAPEN – Open Access Publishing in European Networks, the organization that publishes for European academic presses open access peer-reviewed monographs in the humanities and social sciences; the Supervisory Board of Digital Heritage Netherlands;  and the Board of Directors of Bibliotheek.nl, the organization that develops the national digital infrastructure for public libraries in the Netherlands.

Furthermore, he is a member of the Steering Committee on the National Information Infrastructure (GII); the Standardization Council, working on digital standardization in the areas of teaching and research, and the Policy Group Innovation Knowledge Infrastructure at SURF. He is a frequent keynote speaker and has presented papers at numerous conferences in the United States, Europe and Africa on topics relating to digital libraries, innovation, changing libraries and e-publishing. 

Kurt studied Germanic Philology at the Free University Brussels in Belgium, Comparative Literature and Library & Information Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

About the OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series

The OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series was established in 1978 to encourage the exchange of ideas across the barriers of time, space and disciplines. Each year we invite distinguished professionals to our headquarters in Dublin, Ohio to give presentations on topics of current interest. Speakers may discuss recently completed or early-stage research that they have undertaken or report other types of professional activity. Some topics align closely with our current research directions, while others represent areas of interest to the library and information science community that are not formally being studied by our researchers. Diversity of topics is essential to meeting the purpose of the Distinguished Seminar Series. See our Distinguished Seminar Series page for a list of previous speakers and their presentations.

A recording of this presentation will be made available on this page and on YouTube in the weeks following the presentation.