Ching-chih Chen, President and CEO

Dr. Ching-chih Chen is a consultant and speaker to over 40 countries.  She became Professor Emeritus of Simmons College, Boston in June, 2010 and has since become President of a non-profit organization, Global Connection and Collaboration, Inc. In September, 2010, she was named Honorary Chair Professor of National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. 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, interactive videodisc technology, global information infrastructure, information management, 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). She has led two major National Science Foundation / International Digital Library Projects (IDLP): (1) Global Memory Net, a global image digital library and gateway to the world cultural, historical, and heritage multimedia resources, with collaborators from different part of the world, and this project has also led to World Heritage Memory Net in partnership with the UNESCO’s World Heritage Center, and (2) International Collaboration to Advance User-oriented Technologies for Managing and Distributing Images in Digital Libraries. She is also co-PI, with Prof. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University, of the China-US Million Book Digital Library Project.

An elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1985), she was appointed by President Clinton in February 1997 to serve as a member of the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). PITAC was established by a new Presidential Executive Order. Under both Presidents Clinton and Bush during 1997 to December 2002, she co-chaired the PITAC Subcommittee on International Issues, and was 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. She also chaired the PITAC's activity on Digital Divide for Smaller Institutions. During 1987 to 2001, Dr. 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).

She served as an Honorary Professor of several universities, including Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and University of Hainan, China. Active in the digital library area, she was the co-Chair of the 4th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) held in Tucson, Arizona in June 2004. She was on the Advisory Board of DELOS (the European Digital Network for Excellence), serving as the US Co-Chair of the NSF/DELOS Working Group in Digital Imagery for Significant Cultural, Historical and Heritage Materials, and served as the co-editor for the Journal of Digital Library’s Special Issue on Multimedia Contents in Digital Libraries (February 2006).

A sought-after international speaker in over two dozen countries, she has delivered keynote speeches and made presentations at numerous international conferences including those in countries like Argentina, China, Croatia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, Spain, Singapore, South Africa, Swaziland, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, Vietnam, etc.

She has been on the advisory board of several national digital library projects; she served as a consultant to OCLC for its Global Digital Initiative in 2005.  She is a recipient of over twenty major awards since 1970.  Since 2006, two major awards given to her were the coveted LITA/OCLC Kilgour Award from the Library Information Technology Association in June 2006, and the American Library Association’s major Beta Phi Mu Award in June 2008.  The broad-based societal impact of her R&D work has been significant, and for this global work, she received the International Peace Prize of the United Cultural Convention of the USA in June 2006 for better promoting intercultural understanding during this troubled time.

Detailed Bio/Publication Information