Bio: Ian Ibbotson

Director, Knowledge Integration Ltd

Ian Ibbotson is a veteran developer in the Library Management System arena. He started his career in the early 90s in the UK with FDI where he was the technical lead on many ELib and EU funded research projects, with a particular focus on shared library services, semantic and syntactic interoperability and distributed systems. He has worked on a number of early research projects in library automation and ILL protocols, and has participated in best practice standards bodies such as the IPIG (ILL Protocol Implementors Group) and ZIG (Z3950 Implementors Group). Whilst at FDI, Ian was responsible for the delivery of ILL focussed EU research projects (DALI, GAIA) and their subsequent productization as the VDX toolset. In 1999 Ian founded Knowledge Integration Ltd (K-Int) as a company providing open source solutions and services to library system vendors wanting to interoperate with other vendor systems. Lowering barriers to working together, developing shared practice and helping prevent unwanted lock-in have been core themes in his work. At K-Int, Ian has maintained and extended his passion for collaborative working, open practices and mutual benefit. Over the past 20 years K-Int has grown to a 16 strong team with prestige clients in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector.  Outside his office life, Ian also holds an associate teaching position at the local university where he teaches web architectures and supervises final year projects in the areas of open data, information retrieval, text processing, semantic computing and organizational cybernetics.