In many organizations there is someone who is a linchpin. A linchpin is defined by the dictionary as “a locking pin inserted crosswise” or more importantly to this discussion, “a central cohesive source of support and stability”. In the World Wide Web Virtual Library, our linchpin was named Bertrand Ibrahim.

The Virtual Library is made up of a lot of brilliant men and women who have decided that their collection of online resources in their particular topic are significant and worthy of sharing with the world in some type of structured way. Like the Internet itself, for many years the Virtual Library was sort of an anarchy, skillfully tied together by the database maintainers. The Virtual Library was actually founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and was taken over soon thereafter by his colleague at CERN, Arthur Secret, who managed it until Gerard Manning took over in 1997. Around that time many of us working on the Virtual Library decided that we needed a little more structure, so we formed an Ad-Hoc Committee, which Bertrand Ibrahim chaired, to determine how we could do that. Under his wise leadership we drafted and adopted a constitution and by-laws, and as a result we held an election in which the members of the Virtual Library chose a Council to provide governance for the VL. Once the Council was elected, we selected Gerard Manning as Chair and Bertrand Ibrahim as Vice Chair and Secretary. (I have the privilege of serving as a member of the Council.)

Gerard Manning is wonderful person. He's the director of bioinformatics for the Salk Institute of San Diego, one of the nation's premier biological research centers, and his research interests center on the use of computational methods to the understanding and application of complex biological processes, particularly in genomics and evolution. He has capably managed the World Wide Web Virtual Library main pages since 1997, as well as maintaining his Virtual Library section on Drosophila (fruit flies) and Ceolas, the Web's foremost archive covering Celtic music. (He wrote a superb obituary for Bertrand that is still very moving to read.)

However, it was Bertrand Ibrahim that was clearly our linchpin. He was the one that bound us all together, that mediated and resolved conflicts, that kept us all in touch and moving forward. Bertrand was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He graduated from high school and college the same years as I did (1973 and 1977 respectively) and although I never had the privilege of meeting him in person, I would hope that he numbered me among those he thought of as friends. For being about the same age, he seemed much wiser than me, much more centered and confident in himself. He was ever the voice of calm and reason on the Ad-Hoc Committee and the Council and as it turned out, he was truly the soul of the Council as well. Bertrand was taken from us quite unexpectedly by death in July of 2001 at the age of 46. Since than we've sort of been spinning our wheels at the Virtual Library. I understand why completely--we're all very busy people, and without someone like Bertrand to glue us together, to prod us gently, politely, yet firmly, and to keep us on track, we all focus on our own things and the VL fades to the back of our concerns. I know my main foci in this time period have been raising my family, getting our IT degree programs established and restarting my own PhD. Our terms on the the Council all expired in December 2002 and we have not even held new elections. We need someone like Bertrand to get us all moving again, although there will never be another Bertrand. It's really a shame because there is still a lot of promise left in the Virtual Library. I think we would be a perfect starting point for Sir Tim's Semantic Web, for example. Unfortunately I can't fill Bertrand's shoes (I wish I could) and it seems no one else has been ready or willing to step into them.

This is in memory of Bertrand Ibrahim, December 16, 1954 - July 3, 2001; you can't even begin to realize how much we miss you, Bertrand.

Peace.

I just cleaned out about 300 spam comments on my blog. No fun at all and I just want to go to bed. Some 16-year-old left-turned into my Saturn last week and the car is in the body shop for a while. Their insurance company is springing for my rental car; I rate a compact but they gave me a five passenger 4x4 Dodge Ram pickup for the same rate instead. Pretty cool. We were helping some folks from church move out of their house today (moving to an assisted living complex) and the pickup came in very handy! But now I'm just sick and tired. Good-night.