Hilmar Farid is a historian and cultural activist. In the 1990s he was active in the pro-democracy movement. He is a founding member of Jaringan Kerja Budaya, a collective of artists and cultural workers in the early 1990s, and also the Institute of Indonesian Social History in 2000. He taught history and cultural studies at the Jakarta Arts Institute and University of Indonesia for several years. He received his PhD from the National University of Singapore and wrote his thesis on Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the politics of decolonization in Indonesia. He has been an active member of the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA) and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. On 31 December 2015, after a long selection process, he was appointed as the Director General for Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia.

R. David Lankes is a professor and the director of the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. Lankes has always been interested in combining theory and practice to create active research projects that make a difference. His work has been funded by organizations such as The MacArthur Foundation, The Institute for Library and Museum Services, NASA, The U.S. Department of Education, The U.S. Department of Defense, The National Science Foundation, The U.S. State Department, and The American Library Association.

Lankes is a passionate advocate for libraries and their essential role in today’s society earning him the American Library Association’s Ken Haycock Award for Promoting Librarianship in 2016. He also seeks to understand how information approaches and technologies can be used to transform industries. In this capacity he has served on advisory boards and study teams in the fields of libraries, telecommunications, education, and transportation including at the National Academies. He has been a visiting fellow at the National Library of Canada, The Harvard School of Education, and was the first fellow of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy. His book,The Atlas of New Librarianship won the 2012 ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Award for the Best Book in Library Literature.

Professor K.J.P.F.M. Jeurgens (1960) has been appointed professor of Archival Science at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Humanities. He succeeds Prof. Theo Thomassen, who will be retiring. Alongside his professorship, Juergens will continue to serve as an adviser to the Dutch National Archives.

Charles Jeurgens' teaching and research activities span the full breadth of archival science. He is particularly interested in archival practice in a changing virtual information society, the impact of virtualisation on existing archival institutions and jobs in archiving, the valuation and selection of archives and the creation of archives as the subject of historical research. In 2005, Jeurgens advocated that the current relationship between historical studies and archival science should be redefined. As a part of this effort, he introduced the concept of 'historical archival science' in order to offer archival scientists insight into the processes through which information recorded in archives is gathered. He applied this perspective in a subsequent study on the archival process under colonial rule, the results of which are featured in publications such as Colonial Legacy in South East Asia: The Dutch Archives from 2012. Jeurgens' research on the valuation and selection of both paper and digital archives has contributed to new theoretical insights and the design of innovative models, methods and procedures.

As a part of his professorship at the UvA, Jeurgens will work to continue, develop and promote archival science research within the Faculty of Humanities and other national and international research programmes and networks. He will also be teaching students enrolled at programmes such as the Bachelor's in Media and Information and the Cultural Information Science and Archival Science programmes offered as a part of the Heritage Studies Master's programme. One of his key ambitions is to strengthen the link between education and research and the developments and issues in the area of information and archiving within government bodies, businesses and communities. In addition to offering new possibilities for the creation and use of archives, new developments in areas such as big data, digital humanities and e-discovery also raise questions for the archival sector and the field of archival studies and research.

Jeurgens has occupied a part-time professorship in Archival Studies at Leiden University since 2004. He also serves as a scientific/specialist adviser to the Dutch National Archives. Jeurgens holds various advisory and board positions as well. For example, he serves as a member of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies's research committee and as board member of the Royal Netherlands Historical Society, and collaborates intensively with the National Indonesian Archives and National Surinam Archives. He also previously worked as a lecturer and coordinator at the UvA's Master's programme in Archival Science from 2012 to 2014. Jeurgens was trained as a historian at Leiden University where he obtained his doctorate in 1991. He obtained the Archival Science A degree certificate at the Archiefschool in 1992.