The information professions include a diversity of specializations, from librarianship and archival studies to systems design and telecommunications policy. Information schools strive to bring coherence to these specializations, to inculcate students with not only disciplinary depth in their chosen specialty, but also an understanding of, and an appreciation for, the breadth of the field. Unifying principles are sought, while paradoxes and contradictions at the dawn of the 21^st century expose the apparent naiveté of this aspiration. How does one resolve the tensions that emerge? Information scientists may find their careers in national security, largely driven by a war on terror that inhibits broad access to sensitive information while collecting vast amounts of personal information.  Librarians are more likely to profess values of open information access while ensuring patron privacy.  Archivists find themselves, surprisingly, caught in the middle, confronting immense ethical and legal issues about matters of access to and administration of records for accountability and related concerns.  How does an information school address such disparity and retain intellectual coherence within and across the curriculum?  How does an information school ethically and practically respond, for example, to funding opportunities for designing information systems that challenge statements of professional ethics and engage greatly differing personal perspectives?

Ronald Larsen came to the University of Pittsburgh as dean and professor in 2002.  The School offers undergraduate and graduate education in Information Science, graduate education in Telecommunications, and graduate education, including a professional degree, in Library and Information Science.  Prior to accepting the deanship at SIS, he was executive director of the Maryland Applied Information Technology Initiative (MAITI), a consortium of ten universities, from 1999 to 2002.  From 1996 to 1999, he was assistant director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Technology Office (ITO), where he developed and managed research programs in information management, digital libraries, and cross-lingual information services, including machine translation.  Prior to that, he held a variety of administrative and research positions at the University of Maryland (1985-96), and a variety of technical, research, and administrative positions at NASA (1968-85). 

Dr. Larsen has many years in government and academia developing and managing large scale research programs, administering academic programs, teaching, and conducting research.  During his tenure at NASA he initiated the agency’s research program in Computer Science.  At the time of his departure from DARPA, he had launched the single largest research and technology development program in the Information Technology Office, a program in cross-lingual information retrieval and digital libraries called TIDES, or Translingual Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization.

Student Meeting at Advanticom
Warren W. Randall
FedEx and ITT Student

Randall will be explaining the use of VMware which uses virtual server.  VMware can be installed on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources. This gives greater hardware utilization and flexibility.  Streamline software development, testing and simplify server provisioning giving you the ability to build only once and deploy many, many times.  

• Provision a new server in minutes without investing in new hardware.
• Simplify IT testing of patches, new applications and operating systems.
• The benefits of server virtualization can be realized by a company of any size.

Benefits of Virtualization

• Streamline software development and testing by allowing developers to create multiple environments with different operating systems on the same server.
• Simplify IT testing of patches, new applications and operating systems by allowing systems administrators to test in secure virtual machines and be able to roll back to a clean state by leveraging snapshots.
• Simplify server provisioning by building a virtual machine once and deploying it multiple times.
• Evaluate software in ready-to-run virtual machines without installation and configuration.
• Re-host legacy operating systems such as Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows 2000 Server in a virtual machine running on new hardware and operating system.
• Leverage pre-built, ready-to-run virtual appliances that include virtual hardware, operating system and application environments. Virtual appliances for Web, file, print, DNS, email, proxy and other infrastructure services are available for download.