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GENIUS INTERVIEW Barbara Lange
FEED: How did you come to head up SMPTE? You originally trained as a scientist, right? Barbara Lange: Yes, I was a scientist, for a brief moment in my career. I had a degree in chemistry, but then I landed in academic publishing. As the internet became mainstream, academics and institutions started working with chemistry databases. It exciting times, – doing very primitive types of searching, before there was ever a notion of anything like Google. I ended up working for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which is a large technical professional association – they claim they are the largest technical association in the world, with over 400,000 members – and they are a major academic publisher in engineering. I got involved in platform development and product managment, and helped migrate them from print to an electronic publishing operation. It was the late nineties and early two thousands, and it was all about getting rid of print and taking advantage of the capabilities of search. I became intimately involved with building IEEE’s digital library platform. Then in 2010 I got recruited to lead SMPTE. SMPTE was at a point where it really needed to operate as a business and take advantage of all the wonderful intellectual property it had. I’m now
helping to keep it sustainable well into its next century. FEED: How have things changed at SMPTE since you came aboard? BL: We’ve done great things in the last eight years. We now have our own digital library. We’ve grown our visibility, both in terms of our membership and what people know about us. Our educational programming has advanced as well. There’s more work to do, but I’d like to think we’ve become more visible to the community – and all this while the industry has really grown and changed, and migrated headlong into the IP and streaming world. When I joined SMPTE I didn’t have an iPad. I barely had my first iPhone, and now we can hardly imagine living without those devices. FEED: What were some of the issues that needed to be upgraded when you arrived at SMPTE in 2010? BL: The Society was trying to address the digital transition both from the industry side as well as internally. Change is hard and a lot of organisations didn’t survive. In that first internet bubble, we saw SMPTE change significantly with an influx of the new technology and a new way of thinking. I think it really impacted the organisation, and it took about ten years for the board to understand
FROM THE VERY START SMPTE film leaders and test patterns have provided a true north for countless film and TV productions.
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