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ISKO UK Committee

ISKO UK Executive Committee

Upon election, any member may serve on the Committee for up to four years, after which he or she is eligible for re-election for a further term of four years. A person holding one of the four offices described may not continue in that role for more than two consecutive terms. The Executive Committee may co-opt members at any time to fill vacancies. More detail is available under the Members Area (restricted access).

The current members of the Executive Committee are (with links to their profiles):

Chair Aida Slavic

Vice-Chair Ian Synge

Secretary Tanja Svarre

Treasurer Eugene Morozov

Member Niké Brown

Member John Akeroyd

Member Anna Buck

Member Duncan McKay

Chair

Aida Slavic

I am a long time member of ISKO and one of the founding members of the UK Chapter. I currently serve as Chair and Event Coordinator. Apart from my roles in our Chapter I am also a member of the ISKO Board of Directors, and a member of ISKO's Editorial Board of the Knowledge Organization journal.

My main job is Editor-in-Chief of the Universal Decimal Classification at the UDC Consortium (The Hague, Netherlands). I am also an adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia where I occasionally participate as a lecturer of postgraduate courses in indexing languages, knowledge organization and information retrieval (my webpage).

Vice Chair

Ian Synge

I have been working in the knowledge organization field for over 20 years, predominantly in the publishing space, and with a particular interest in the application of vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies to help organizations solve business problems. To that end I have designed taxonomy systems using applications such as Verity/Autonomy, SmartLogic, and MarkLogic for organizations including NATO, Eni, and Nizhny Novgorod State University.

Currently a Principal Consultant with Massachusetts based Copyright Clearance Centre focused on content management, search solutions, and knowledge graphs, I have previously worked with Jane’s Information Services, Inchcape Shipping Services, and ICAEW. My PhD Thesis (Aberystwyth 2001) focused on taxonomic interpretations of naval diplomacy in the late Cold War.

Based in South East London, I enjoy cooking, history, and looking after my middle-aged rescue cat.

Secretary

Tanja Svarre

I am an associate professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, where I have been teaching information architecture and knowledge organization at bachelor’s and master’s level for the past 10 years. I earned my PhD degree in 2012 at Aalborg University on the topic of automatic indexing methods within the public domain. My research interest in knowledge organization concerns automated methods and artificial intelligence, and how they can benefit workplace users in their interaction with information, but also the impact of metadata and data quality.

I have been a part of the organizing committee of the international ISKO conference 2020 and 2022. I took my master’s at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, and worked for three years as a librarian at Aarhus School of Business Library before starting my PhD.

Treasurer

Eugene Morozov

Technology professional with a background in software engineering and over 20 years of experience building information systems for clients in financial services, telecoms, and travel. Interested in building knowledge graphs and applying knowledge organization ideas to enterprise architecture, data governance, risk management and compliance. Developer of Taxonomies for Confluence add-on. Co-organizer of ISKO UK Meetup.

Committee Members

Niké Brown

Information scientist and publishing professional for over 25 years. I worked for Wolters Kluwer UK for over 20 years in a number of roles including online content manager, content architect and thesaurus manager. I currently work at John Wiley and Sons as the company’s enrichment specialist. I attained an Honours Degree in Information Management and Publishing. I have been an active member of ISKO UK for a number of years, and I have been part of the ISKO UK Meetup team since it restarted in February 2020.

Duncan J McKay

Now, well retired, my professional career was spent mostly in the oil sector providing library and information services within a number of Upstream Oil Companies starting with BNOC in Glasgow and ending with ConocoPhillips in Aberdeen from whom I took early retirement in 2010. In the KO field my interests were, and remain, in classification schemes and their application in automated cataloguing systems.

John Akeroyd

Johnis a long-standing information and digital library specialist. After a career in university libraries, he has been a consultant and researcher in varied aspects of information management, including metadata standards, digital library development, digital accessibility and most recently, user perspectives on scholarly communications, especially in the context of AI. He has published over 100 papers and given multiple presentations in the UK and internationally. He is currently semi-retired though attached to CIBER research – a small research company with global reach and University College London.

Anna Buck

Library and information professional with experience across the heritage, academic, and legal sectors. I currently work as a Taxonomist in the Indexing and Data Management section of the House of Commons Library, where I maintain Parliament's thesaurus, support subject analysis, and help shape the information architecture that connects users with parliamentary information. I am interested in the use of controlled vocabularies and knowledge graphs to link siloed resources and improve discovery and retrieval. I have been a member of ISKO UK since 2022.