Lorcan Dempsey is a librarian who was a vice president and Chief Strategist of OCLC, where he worked for 21 years between 2001 and 2022. He is a native of

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

, Ireland, where he worked for some years in public libraries. He writes and talks about

libraries A library is a collection of Document, materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or electronic media, digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a ...

and networked information. He is interested in the impact of changing patterns of research and learning on libraries, in libraries as public institutions, and in the architecture of digital information environments.

Career

Dempsey was appointed director of UKOLN, a research and policy unit at the

University of Bath (Virgil, Georgics II) , mottoeng = Learn the culture proper to each after its kind , established = 1886 (Merchant Venturers Technical College) 1960 (Bristol College of Science and Technology) 1966 (Bath University of Technology) 1971 (univ ...

, in 1994. In May 2000, Dempsey moved to work for the

Jisc Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector. History T ...

; part of his assignment involved being Programme Director of the DNER. In 2001 he joined the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) as Vice-President of Research. He was named OCLC Chief Strategist in March 2004. In January 2022, OCLC announced that Dempsey would retire from his position in April 2022, though he stayed through June.

Influence

Dempsey maintains a blogOriginally at: Later continued at: aimed at the wider library and digital information sectors, and tweets on similar issues. A 2007 blog post was responsible for the coining of the term ''

amplified conference An amplified conference is a conference or similar event in which the talks and discussions at the conference are 'amplified' through use of networked technologies in order to extend the reach of the conference deliberations. The term was originall ...

''. He has introduced many other concepts and terminology into the library community, including the ''network level''; '' collective collection''; ''disclosure''; ''sourcing and scaling''; ''library logistics''; ''making data work harder''; ''Amazoogle''; ''in the flow''; ''discovery happens elsewhere''; ''inside out and outside in (of collections)'' and ''web scale''. He introduced the term ''

memory institution A memory institution is an organization maintaining a repository of public knowledge, a generic term used about institutions such as libraries, archives, heritage (monuments & sites) institutions, aquaria and arboreta, and zoological and botanical ...

'' into popular use. Dempsey has written and presented extensively on library issues. His published works cover topics such as the Warwick Framework, libraries in the contemporary world, the evolution of the digital library, and the library catalogue.

Views on Wikipedia

In 2006 he noted the importance of Wikipedia as an ''addressable

knowledge base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...

'': Wikipedia makes it easy to include in any online communications a pointer to more knowledge on any topic using a convenient stable URL. Reprinted in: "The economy and convenience of doing this is enormous", he said. In 2012 he noted: "Wikipedia is already an 'addressable knowledge base', which creates huge value.

DBpedia DBpedia (from "DB" for " database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to semanti ...

aims to add structure to this. Perhaps more importantly,

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...

is an initiative to create a machine- and human-readable knowledge base of all the entities in Wikipedia and allow them to be augmented with further data and links."

Facilitation

* Course Director, TICER Summer School, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 21 to 24 August 2012. * Principal presenter, Hong Kong University Libraries Leadership Institute, Bangkok, Thailand, 29 April to 3 May 2011.

Contributions to invitational lecture series

* The Research Library: Scalable Efficiency and Scalable Learning. 2012 SLIS David Kaser Lecture Series, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 7 October 2012. * Universities, libraries, collections, futures. Miles Conrad Lecture, NFAIS 52nd Annual Conference, Philadelphia. 1 March 2010. * Discovery, Delivery, Disclosure. University of Minnesota Libraries Planning Speaker Series. Minneapolis, 23 November 2009. * The Changing Scholarly and Cultural Record. Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. 5 December 2007. * The Network Rewrites the Library. Phineas L. Windsor Lectureship, UIUC-Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. 23 February 2007. * Libraries and the network platform: A new cooperative context. Inaugural Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture in Information and Library Science, The School of Information and Library Science, UNC, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 22 February 2006.

Awards

Dempsey is the co-recipient of the 2004 ALCTS presidential citation and the 2010 NFAIS Miles Conrad award. In June 2014, Dempsey was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of the University (DUniv) by The Open University of the UK.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dempsey, Lorcan 1958 births Academics of Aberystwyth University Alumni of University College Dublin Irish librarians Irish scholars and academics Living people OCLC people People from Dublin (city) People with acquired American citizenship