CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.

CERN is run through a structure of departments. The IT Department’s mission is to provide the information technology required for the fulfillment of the laboratory’s mission in an efficient and effective manner through building world-class competencies in the technical analysis, design, procurement, implementation, operation and support of computing infrastructure and services.

Within the IT department and under the User & Document Services group the CERN Document Server team Provides document repositories containing over 1 million bibliographic records, more than 400,000 full text documents, of interest to people working in particle physics and related areas. Material covered includes preprints, articles, books, journals, photos, and videos, and services include the provision of:

  • An institutional repository for CERN documents, to organize and manage them in collections, and to archive them
  • A disciplinary archive, INSPIRE, for the HEP community in collaboration with the CERN Library and the libraries of SLAC, DESY, and Fermilab.
  • The workflows for electronic submissions of documents from inside and outside of CERN.
  • Support for the electronic version of bulletins, e.g., the CERN bulletin, CMS Bulletin, Staff Association.
  • The software, Invenio, that enables the construction of a digital repository for all types of documents.
  • The software to manage the day-to-day operations of the CERN Library: requesting works, borrowing works, accessing periodicals.
  • The software allowing the communication of physics research progress, discussion between stakeholders, and approval of results.

People

  • Jean-Yves Le Meur has a Master in Computing at Oxford University and he is now in charge of the CERN Document Server, which includes all scientific information electronic acquisition and dissemination. After fifteen years at CERN, he has become expert in the analysis and development of library web based applications. He has gained experience through many projects, supervising students, publishing papers and actively participating to Web conferences and Open Access workshops. He will follow up the different phases of BlogForever to ensure the good collaboration between the various project participants, in particular for WP4.

  • Tibor Simko received PhD in plasma physics from Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia and University Paris XI Orsay, France. He has been working in the digital library field since 1998. He is the lead architect and developer of the Invenio digital library software. He has top level expertise in the domain of information management and Retrieval, storing and seeking electronic information, indexing and search engines, ranking and classification, lexical analysis and digital libraries. He is also the technical coordinator of INSPIRE, the next-generation high-energy physics information system being co-developed by a collaboration of the major HEP laboratories worldwide. Tibor Simko will supervise the design and technical developments needed on top of Invenio to make it the expected Blog Forever digital repository. He will ensure the quality control of all code committed to the Invenio code-base and provide guidance to the developers.

  • Nikos Kasioumis has a master in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Currently he’s employed at CERN as a fellow and in the past he spent 14 months as a technical student developing new features for Invenio and improving existing ones. He has also been involved and worked in various IT projects at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), the Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET) and the Hellenic army as well as in free and open source software related movements and international student organizations. Nikos will be a full-time software developer for BlogForever and will be actively leading the project for CERN.

  • Jaime Garcia Llopis has a Master in Computer Science Engineering at the Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain). Currently he’s employed at CERN as a fellow and in the past, he spent 14 months as a technical student. He has worked at HEPIA-Genève (Haute école du paysage, d’ingénierie et d’architecture) involved in EDGI project (European Desktop Grid Initiative). Jaime will be a full-time software developer for BlogForever project.

  • Raquel Jiménez Encinar has a Master in Computer Science Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Madrid, Spain). Currently she is employed at CERN as a fellow and in the past, she spent 14 months as a technical student working on numerous software infrastructure projects for Invenio, touching a very wide variety of topics. Raquel will be a full-time software developer for BlogForever project.