Mark Needleman Leaves CDL

Everyone at CDL will miss Mark Needleman, currently the Coordinator of Advanced Technology at CDL Technologies.  He will start a new position in December with DRA (Data Research Associates) in St. Louis as a Product Development Specialist in Standards.  He will be coordinating DRA’s activities in various information and networking standards activities.

Mark leaves us in early November after nearly 20 years at DLA and then CDL.  He began his career with UCOP, in the very early days of DLA, as a Systems Programmer working on the infant Melvyl Catalog database.  Over the years, as the automated database system evolved, Mark evolved too as a Principal Systems Programmer and then Coordinator for Advanced Technology Development.

Mark has been a member of University of California Communications Policy Group Technical Subgroup and of the University Librarians subcommittee of Heads of Systems.

Mark’s UC projects include an implementation of the ANSI Z39.50 information retrieval protocol, a prototype OSI testbed network, the implementation of the TULIP project (with Elsevier Science Publishers) to provide access to bit-mapped images of journal articles, and (with IEEE) an investigation of electronic and network delivery of IEEE materials.

Mark’s work has included significant contributions outside of UC.  He was, for example, one of a two-member team that designed, wrote, and implemented a Department of Defense ARPANET TCP/IP packet switching protocol for the IBM 370.

Representing the University in national activities, Mark has been an active member of EDUCOM and ASIS for many years, and was chair of the ASIS Standards Committee.  He was Deputy Project Manager for External Standards for IBM’s SHARE and worked with the ANSI X3T5 standards group, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the North American Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery standards subgroup, the Interlibrary Loan Protocol Implementation Group, and the Internet Engineering Task Force.  Mark has also been involved in the American Library Association, the Library Information Technology Association, and the Coalition for Networked Information, concentrating on the Z39.50 protocol.   Additionally, Mark has been the Editor for a regular column on standards issues for Serials Review.

But all these contributions are not why we at CDL will miss Mark.  We will miss his sense of humor (with thanks to Groucho Marx and Woody Allen) and his NY cabbie stories and his great generosity and goodwill throughout these past 19 years.