Keynote Speaker
Eleanor E. Fink currently heads the World Bank’s Foundations Unit within the Global Programs and Partnerships Group. She and her staff provide policy, strategic planning, and program guidance to the Bank’s senior managers, country directors, and project managers on establishing partnerships with foundations.
During her tenure at the World Bank she launched a philanthropy initiative that explores how establishing community foundations in developing countries can empower and help people in local communities handle and manage finances and make grants that in turn create businesses, organizations, and services. She also helped establish the Development Gateway Foundation (www.dgfoundation.org) whose core mission is to reduce poverty and support sustainable development through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT).
Prior to the World Bank she was Director of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s Information Institute (GII) where she led the development of information policies and standards needed to manage and protect cultural assets. She positioned the Getty Information Institute around the concept of universal access to art and images and promoted the concept of “interworkability” and shared cataloguing within and across professional art groups. While director of GII, she established the Getty Vocabulary Coordination Department – now known as the Getty Vocabularies under the Getty Research Institute. Both the ULAN and Thesaurus of Geographic Names are programs she initiated. She conceived and launched Object ID -- an internationally recognized information standard now supported by UNESCO, ICOM, and Interpol that helps recover stolen art objects. She launched the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) and Los Angeles Culture Net – a web based gateway to the arts across the greater Los Angeles area (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march99/fink/03fink.html).
Before joining the Getty, she was Chief of the Office of Research Support at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art where she directed several computer art research projects and oversaw the preservation and cataloguing of the Peter A. Juley and Son Collection of historic photographs. She established SOS: Save Outdoor Sculpture, a highly successful national arts program that engages volunteers throughout the United States in recording historical and physical condition information about sculptures located in parks, towns, and cities throughout the United States. Today SOS is reaching every corner of the United States and is being supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Eleanor is a past President of the Visual Resources Association and also a past president of the Museum Computer Network. She received distinguished leadership awards from both organizations. She is the founding director of the standards committee of CIDOC, the Documentation Committee of the International Council of Museums.
Eleanor currently is on the editorial board of Alliance Magazine, a journal that focuses on global philanthropy. She serves on the advisory committee of Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archeology. She is also a member of Arttable, a national association of women leaders in the arts.
