Mark Kornbluh
Executive Director
Michigan State University
H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine
310 Auditorium Bldg.
East Lansing MI
48824 USA
http://www.h-net.msu.edu

The largest humanities technology center in an American university, MATRIX's research focuses on multimedia digital repositories, educational uses of online content, and the use of the Internet for development.

Kornbluh is the Principle Investigator on a wide range of research and education projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the Nation Endowment for the Humanities, the State Department, Aid for International Development, the Department of Education, the Ford Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Michigan Humanities Council, and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Kornbluh oversees the National Gallery of the Spoken Word, a five year, $3.6 million dollar project to develop the usefulness of audio resources on line and "The Spoken Word: New Resources to Transform Teaching and Learning," an international NSF-funded collaborative project to incorporate audio resources into university courses. He is also directing the development of the African Online Digital Library, the first NSF-funded US-African partnership project in developing digital library resources.

A specialist in Modern American political history, whose historical scholarship focuses on political participation in the United States, Kornbluh is the author of "Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern Electoral Politics, 1880-1918," New York University Press. His interests in democracy have involved him in a wide range of digital projects to bridge the digital divide worldwide. Kornbluh directs a State Department funded program to assist women's democratic organizing in West Africa by transferring Internet skills to women leaders and organizations. Kornbluh also co-directs a million dollar project funded by the Mellon and Ford Foundations, the South African National Cultural Heritage Training and Technology project, which is designed to overcome the legacy of Apartheid by strengthening south African civil society and training a new multicultural generation of cultural workers in that country.

Kornbluh also serves as the executive director of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine, an international scholarly society composed of over 140 discussion networks with over 500 scholarly editors and over 100,000 members. Committed to developing free and open access to scholarly resources online, H-Net is the world's largest publisher of online scholarly book reviews and hosts one of the most used humanities sites on the web.

Kornbluh has spoken at conferences around the world on a wide range of digital humanities issues, and has served as an advisor and/or evaluator for many funding agencies on digital projects. He currently serves on a wide variety of advisory and oversight boards including the National Academy of Science's Computer Science and Technology Board's Taskforce on Digital Preservation and the National Archives, the American Historical Association's Task Force on Intellectual Property, the National Advisory Board for METS: Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standards, The Steering Committee for Building Blocks, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage's project to link humanists and computer scientists, NINCH's Best Practices in Humanities Digitization Advisory Board, the National Advisory Board for the Society of History Education, the Editorial Board for the Journal of Multimedia History, and the National Advisory Board for MaLACH, Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives.

Mark will present Bits & Bolts to Bits & Bytes: The Quilt Index Online Repository and Distributed Archival Management System.