KMWorld's Community Awards: Marjorie Hlava, Stan Garfield
The KM Community Awards, new in 2024, recognize an individual or individuals who have made a significant impact in the KM community. The award recipients, selected by KMWorld from nominations submitted by the KM community, have demonstrated meaningful contributions to the common good of the KM and information industries through volunteerism, research, published works, and/or project management.
The winners, who were announced at the KMWorld conference luncheon on Nov. 21, 2024, were Marjorie Hlava, founder and chief science officer at Access Innovations, and Stan Garfield, founder of the SIKM Leaders Community.
Margie Hlava
Margie Hlava is the founder of Access Innovations and took on the role of chief scientist in 2023. Access Innovations creates and maintains the Data Harmony semantic software suite for taxonomy, thesaurus, and authority file applications and auto-indexing. Her groundbreaking work has earned her numerous awards, including ASIS&T’s Award of Merit, the SLA John Cotton Dana Award, the SLA President’s Award, and recognition as an SLA Fellow. She has also been honored as an Albuquerque Business First Woman of Influence for Technology and received the Miles Conrad lectureship for NFAIS.
Hlava is actively involved in standards development, having contributed to several key initiatives such as Dublin Core, Credit Z39.104, and ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (R2010): Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. She was elected to the Hubbell Hall of Fame in 2019. Her most recent standards work is as the convener and chair of the ISO TC46/ SC9/Working group 8 for the revision of the “ISO/CD 25964-1, Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies–Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval, management and use,” which is now in the comment voting process.
Presenting the award to Hlava was Dave Clarke, EVP, Semantic Graph Technology, Synaptica, part of Squirro. Noting that Hlava has been awarded two patents and has 600 taxonomies under her belt, he commented on her unparalleled expertise in her contributions to the information standards community and saluted her leadership and exceptional dedication to the knowledge community.
Stan Garfield
Stan Garfield is renowned as a KM author, speaker, and community leader. He was the community evangelist in global knowledge services, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited for 8 years. He spent 25 years at HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corp. Garfield launched Digital’s first KM program in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq, and led the Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management Program for HP. He is the founder and leader of the SIKM Leaders Community with more than 1,200 members worldwide, which remains a very active KM community. He is the author of six books, the latest of which, Profiles in Knowledge: 120 Thought Leaders in Knowledge Management, published by Lucidea Press, is a compilation of the writing and thinking of leading KM practitioners, grouped into 20 categories.
Patrick Lambe, principal consultant, Straits Knowledge, and author of Principles of Knowledge Auditing: Foundations for KM Implementation, presented the award to Garfield. He congratulated Garfield on his ability to keep the knowledge community connected and on the decades he has spent creating a knowledge infrastructure for the community. Garfield’s content curation work and spirit of generosity “exemplify the best aspirations and values of our profession,” said Lambe. He is a man of “decency, honor, integrity, and service.”
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