Bonnie C. Carroll, local entrepreneur, corporate and government leader and former data center coordinator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will speak to Friends of ORNL Tuesday, May 10 at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike.
Its theme is “The Power of Information: An Early ORNL Spinoff Company and the Development of a New World of Open Science and Open Data.” His lectures will also be available virtually.
Carroll is the retired interim executive director of the World Data Systems International Program Office, but is best known locally as the founder and retired chief executive officer of Information International Associates Inc. (IIa), an Oak Ridge-based company. This information management and technology company had about 300 employees when it sold it in 2018 after 30 years of operation.
Attendees of in-person lectures will have to wear masks. Masks will be provided. Eating is discouraged during the event.
To view the virtual lecture at 11 a.m., click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and click on the zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.
Carroll has supported government, academia and industry in managing information as a strategic resource for nearly five decades. Prior to founding IIa, he worked at ORNL from 1971 to 1978, where he held progressively more responsible positions from librarian to information specialist to ORNL data center coordinator under the associate laboratory director of environmental and biomedical sciences. After leaving ORNL she spent two years in the private sector and then became a federal employee at the US Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in Oak Ridge. He left OSTI in 1987 and founded IIa shortly thereafter.
In her speech, Carroll will describe her growth path as an entrepreneur who built a $73 million company based on her experience with ORNL and OSTI. She will note that the “backbone” of IIa was the development of scientific data and information management that began after ORNL director Alvin Weinberg wrote the “Science, Government and Information” report issued by the President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1963 and often It was called. Weinberg Report.
Carroll said she would describe “trends and developments in the 1970s starting with the 24 information centers at ORNL, the evolution of information technologies into the world of open science from the first automation of scientific information before personal computing, the Internet, and the Web.” are open via .info.
“I will explain how the IIA was impacted and had an impact on developments in data policy and practice,” she said.
She will talk about her sale of IIa in 2018 and her continuing work to contribute to the development of a National Research Data Framework for the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. Most recently, he was instrumental in bringing the World Data Systems International Program Office into a joint venture between the Oak Ridge Innovation Institute, ORNL, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Today, she serves on the Research Data and Information Board of the US National Academy of Sciences, has been Secretary General of the Data Committee for Science and Technology, or CODATA (term ends November 2021), and is chair of the US National Committee for Codata. . He served on two US White House Interagency Working Groups in Biodiversity Informatics and Digital Data. He has vast experience in organization planning and analysis.
For more than three decades, Carroll was executive director of CENDI (Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group), a federal inter-agency collaboration between 14 agency scientific and technical information managers. It has helped two major US agencies restructure their information exchange programs.
He had a major role in international development projects, one of which was a joint Jordan Technical Information Center and World Bank project, helping to develop a national information policy for the Kingdom of Jordan. She has conducted specialized studies for the International Atomic Energy Agency and led a pilot project to develop telematics services – long-distance transmission of computerized information – for people in the eastern Caribbean.
Carroll is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and has served on its council. He has written and presented extensively on information policy, information strategy and planning for scientific and technical information management.
She is a member of the editorial board of the magazine “Information Services and Use” and the board of visitors to the UT College of Communication and Information. He holds an MS degree from Columbia University and a BA degree from Cornell University.
Carroll said that his experience working across organizational lines and international boundaries in various subject areas helps him understand the needs of various stakeholders in the public and private sectors.
