George Brett

Presentation: Support and Development of Advanced Application Environments

George H. Brett II is a leader in communicating the application and integration of computers and networked information resources  in education, research, and civic environments. Since 1989, Mr. Brett has focused on issues of search, discovery,  presentation and application of networked information resources. 

Currently, George H. Brett II is Senior Project Coordinator of the Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST) of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR). Brett is responsible for strategic planning and outreach activities for the DAST. He brings to this position longtime experience in applying leading edge technologies appropriately to research and education. Brett is currently working to develop a Knowledge Management Clearinghouse (aka The Klearinghouse) that will become a national center for the identification, collection, and dissemination of information about tools, resources, and projects that require high performance networks and computational environments.

Recently Brett served as Director of Networking Initiatives for the Southeastern Universities Research Association where he had programmatic responsibility for an array of projects (e.g., a virtual electronic library initiative), development and support of pending projects (including one with a national supercomputing center), and pursuit of new initiatives beneficial to SURA's members.

During 1996 Mr. Brett was a consultant to the Boulder Public Library (BPL) for Internet based information discovery and retrieval, working with BPL to create a distributed heterogeneous networked digital publishing environment. This meant ensuring that traditional library holdings, new multimedia, and other emerging library services would be made available to patrons not only within the library but also from any other location with access to the global Internet.

From 1991 to 1995 Mr. Brett was Director and Founder of the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval a project of MCNC in the Research Triangle Park, NC.  Previous to that  Mr. Brett spent 9 years managing support for all levels of academic computing for the seventeen colleges and universities in the University of North Carolina system.

Mr. Brett has worked with many national and international standards bodies and other technology organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the EDUCOM Educational Uses of Information Technologies (EUIT), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the European Academic Research Network as well as other international organizations. He has spoken on these matters to groups such as the Global Communications Seminar at the Commission of the European Community, Brussels, Belgium; The Faxon Institute for Advanced Studies in Scholarly and Scientific Communications, Reston, VA; various libraries in the United Kingdom, the 3rd Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; and the Telecommunications in Mathematics and Science Education Workshop sponsored by the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET), Crystal City, VA. Mr. Brett was a Citizen Delegate from North Carolina to the Second White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services.

He founded the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval which was funded as a cooperative agreement by the National Science Foundation in 1992. He has been principal investigator for three other National Science Foundation grants: The Global SchoolHouse, the Presidential Awardees Internet Pilot Project, and the Whois++ testbed. Additionally, he was co principal investigator for Development of a Distributed Information Processing Protocol (DIPP) which was also funded by the National Science Foundation.

Mr. Brett has a Masters of Fine Arts in Fabric Design from the University of Georgia and a Baccalaureate of Arts in Constructive Design from Florida State University. Mr. Brett earned a Certificate of Advanced Studies in 1995 from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on resource discovery.

http://ariel.adgrp.com/~ghb/vita/brief-bio.html