VTLS CEO Dr. Vinod Chachra Speaks on the Global Library Industry and the Future of ILSs

Blacksburg, VA - CEO of VTLS Inc., Dr. Vinod Chachra will participate at this year's RMG Eighteenth Annual Presidents' Seminar: The View from the Top seminar. Chachra is the only executive of a major integrated library system company who has been invited and participated in all 18 of these annual seminars hosted by Rob McGee, President of RMG Consultants, Inc. This free seminar is held annually during ALA Mid-Winter and focuses on topics of significance in the library community.

The theme of this year's seminar is Checks and Balances in the ILS Industry: Founders' Values, Investors' Interests, Open Source ILSs. Chachra will join a panel of colleagues and discuss several topics on an industry-wide level. He will focus on addressing issues in the marketplace caused by selling ILS solutions that are based on open source software. As information seekers start searching with densely inhabited Web spaces such as Google, Amazon, del.icio.us and MySpace, what is the impact on libraries? Chachra will also speak about how investors' interests impact the well-being of libraries' reliance on ILSs, if libraries are getting what they want out of their ILS vendors, and how personalization, messaging, tagging, and bookmarking will help libraries win and keep new customers.

Dr. Chachra is an internationally recognized lecturer and consultant in the field of information system planning. For several years he served as the Senior Consultant for the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. He represented Virginia in the White House Conference on Library and Information Sciences, served on the legislative committee for library networking in Virginia, and is a former member of the White House Conference on Library and Information Services Task Force. He has worked with several countries in the design and implementation of their national bibliographic information resources and union catalogs.

The seminar will take place on Friday January 11, 2008, 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Room 103C. Registration is not required.