Ken Thompson/Richard Ackroyd			August 9, 1.00-3.30
	Richard Akeroyd, Executive Director, Libraries & Public Access to Information, and Ken Thompson, Research Librarian, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will provide a brief overview of the Foundation's Grant Program for Public Libraries, and will provide an extensive discussion of the Foundation's use of Geographic Information Systems software for describing communities around public libraries. The presentation will include a live demonstration of the ArcView GIS software, an explanation of what GIS is, as well as describing research in this field and other ways of utilizing GIS to aid public library leaders in discovering more about the communities that they serve.
				Coordinates
				Ken Thompson is the Group Lead of Research and Library Services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His primary areas of research for the Foundation are in the areas of libraries, community access to technology, and educational technology. He's been with the Foundation since nearly the inception of the US Library Program, and helped create and refine the methodology that underlies grant eligibility for this program. His writing on internet filtering in public libraries was recently translated into Swedish for the Swedish library journal Bis. He has an MLIS from the University of Washington, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago