Prof Ching-chih Chen is Professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, and is a consultant and speaker to over 40 countries. She is the author/editor of more than 35 books and over 200 journal articles in areas of new information technologies, such as global digital libraries, multimedia technology, digital imaging, and information resources, etc.

She produced the award winning interactive videodisc and multimedia CD entitled The First Emperor of China, supported by the US National Endowment for Humanities (NEH). Currently she is leading two major NSF/International Digital Library Projects (IDLP): (1) Global Memory Net, a gateway to the world cultural, historical, and heritage multimedia resources, with collaborators from different part of the world, and (2) International Collaboration to Advance User-oriented Technologies for Managing and Distributing Images in Digital Libraries.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she served as a member of the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) under both President Clinton and President Bush (1997 to December 2002). PITAC was established by a new Presidential Executive Order. During that period, she co-chaired the PITAC Subcommittee on International Issues and the PITAC's activity on Digital Divide for Smaller Institutions. She was also a member of the PITAC Subcommittees on Next Generation Internet (NGI) and IT*2 Initiative Review; and Panels on Digital Divide, Digital Library, Learning of the Future, and Individual Security.

During 1987 to 2001, Prof Chen was Chief Organizer of a series of 12 International Conferences on New Information Technology (NIT) in many continents of the world. The outcome of NIT '99 (Taipei) and NIT'2001 (Beijing) are the two-volume books related to the development of Global Digital Libraries ― IT and Global Digital Library Development (1999) and Global Digital Library Development in the New Millennium: Fertile Ground for Distributed Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration (2001). NIT '92 (the 5^th Conference) was held at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and co-organized by HKUST during Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 1992. Since 2001, she has been active as Chair, Steering Committee member, or keynote speakers at many major International Conferences on Digital Libraries, including JCDL (US), ECDL (Europe), RCDL (Russia), ACADL (Asia), ICDL (India), ICUDL (Hanzhou), etc.

She is a recipient of many major awards from ASIST, LITA, ALA, Association for Visual Communicators, etc. Her latest award was the coveted LITA/OCLC Kilgour Award from the Library Information Technology Association in June 2006.

In recent years, specifically in the last decade, she has devoted her energy to the development of global digitial Library, and has served as consultant to many organizations. Her Global Memory Net was launched in July 2006 (http://www.memorynet.org/), and she has delivered invited and keynote speeches all over the world. In the last six month alone, she spoke in Tainan (Taiwan); Zagreb, Dubrovnik and Zadah (Croatia); Taipei and Tokyo; Seoul and Daijeon (Korea); Florence (Italy); Alicante (Spain); Suzdal (Russian); Beijing.

More information about Prof Ching-chih Chen's activities on Global Memory Net can be found at http:// memorynet.org/archives/gmnet/gmnet_archive.php