Lorcan Dempsey

Lorcan Dempsey is the Vice-President and Chief Strategist of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).

He is a native of Dublin, Ireland, where he worked for some years in public libraries. He writes and talks about libraries and networked information. In recent years, Dempsey has been a regular panellist at the LITA Top Tech Trends at the American Library Association annual conference. He is interested in the impact of changing patterns of research and learning on libraries, in libraries as public institutions, and in the architecture of digital information environments.

Lorcan was appointed director of UKOLN, a research and policy unit at the University of Bath, in 1994. He served on the editorial board of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review from 1992 to 2000.

During most of his time at UKOLN, he also served as a director of Ariadne magazine. He was a co-founder of the Resource Discovery Network, which later became known as Intute.

In May 2000, Lorcan moved to work for the Jisc; part of his assignment involved being Programme Director of the DNER. In 2001 he joined the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) as Vice-President of Research. He was named OCLC Chief Strategist in March 2004.

Lorcan is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Lorcan maintains a blog aimed at the wider library and digital information sectors, and tweets on similar issues.

A 2007 blog post was responsible for the coining of the term amplified conference. He has introduced many other concepts and terminology into the library community, including the network level; collective collection; disclosure; sourcing and scaling; library logistics; making data work harder; Amazoogle; in the flow; discovery happens elsewhere; inside out and outside in (of collections) and web scale. He introduced the term memory institution into popular use.

Lorcan has written and presented extensively on library issues. His published works cover topics such as the Warwick Framework, libraries in the contemporary world, the evolution of the digital library, and the library catalogue.

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