Overview
R. David Lankes, PhD, is Director of the
Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS) and an Associate Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. The IIS houses several high profile research efforts including the Educator’s Reference Desk and several projects related to the NSF’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Lankes received his BFA (Multimedia Design), MS in Telecommunications and Ph.D. from Syracuse University.
Lankes was director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology from 1998-2003 and co-founded the award winning AskERIC project in 1992. Lankes founded the Virtual Reference Desk project that is building a national network of expertise for education. Lankes was also one of the architects of GEM. GEM is a standards-based system for describing and finding educational materials on the Internet. Both GEM and VRD were part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Digital Library Initiative.
Lankes research is in education information and digital reference services. He has authored, co-authored or edited eight books, and written numerous book chapters and journal articles on the Internet and digital reference. He was a visiting scholar to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a visiting fellow at the National Library of Canada. He speaks and consults nationally on Internet issues in education, libraries and business. He has worked closely with the National Library of Education, Library of Congress, Microsoft, the American Library Association, AT&T, OCLC, NEA, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, MCI WorldCom and more.
Research Interests
digital libraries for education including digital reference and metadata
Teaching Interests
reference, information architecture, multimedia, digital libraries
Professional Interests
My research interest is in digital libraries, particularly the use of metadata and digital reference to improve the process of education. My contributions to the field include a set of models and theories on which several large scale projects have been built. I co-founded the AskERIC; the Gateway to Educational Materials, a metadata standard and system for network information discovery and retrieval of educational objects; and the Virtual Reference Desk project, building a clearinghouse and test bed for digital reference, including an international conference for the library community. As an action researcher I have been involved with organizations from the National Science Foundation to AT&T to Microsoft, to the American Library Association to advance knowledge and practice in the library and information science domain. I am the executive director of the Information Institute of Syracuse, a multi-million dollar research center in the School of Information Studies.
Personal Interests
Raising my son and gadgets.