NCSA ACCESS Center Welcomes the International Institute of Municipal Clerks
released 08.12.05
Contact
Trish Barker
NCSA Public Information Specialist
tlbarker@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.8013
CHAMPAIGN, IL —
The International Institute of Municipal Clerks (IIMC) has opened a satellite office at the NCSA ACCESS Center. Located in Arlington, Virginia, the NCSA ACCESS Center makes cutting-edge collaboration and communication technology available for education, business, government, and other organizations.
NCSA and IIMC are excited by the synergistic opportunities presented by this new relationship, with IIMC eager to tap both the center's technological innovations and its expertise in building cybercommunities, while NCSA is eager to extend its outreach efforts to the area of e-governance.
IIMC, established in 1947, is the leading professional association serving the needs of municipal clerks, secretaries, treasurers, recorders, and other allied associations from cities and towns worldwide. Its more than 10,000 members represent municipalities in North America and 15 other countries. Municipal clerks have become the hub of government, the direct link between community inhabitants and their government. The clerk is the historian of the community, superintending the entire recorded history of the municipality and its people.
"The municipal clerk is an integral component of the community and its citizens. This is a groundbreaking cybercommunity that is just beginning to form around front line governance interests," said Janet Thot-Thompson, director of the NCSA ACCESS Center.
IIMC's primary goal is to promote the continuing education and professional development of municipal clerks through certification, publications, networking, annual conferences, research, and 46 university-based programs.
IIMC envisions using the capabilities of NCSA's ACCESS Center—such as the facility's advanced collaboration technologies and multiple Access Grid nodes—to enhance its training of members across the country and around the globe. IIMC believes NCSA's ACCESS Center can be a hub in a global leadership training and continuing education network, bringing quality programs to members worldwide.
The programmatic activities at the NCSA ACCESS Center also present opportunities. The ACCESS Center serves as headquarters for the Multi-Sector Crisis Management Consortium (MSCMC), a nonprofit group whose mission is to advance the research, development, knowledge, and application of information technology for crisis management and emergency response among government agencies, academia, and the private sector. The overlap in interests between IIMC and MSCMC could lead to collaboration and shared activities.
IIMC was introduced to the NCSA ACCESS Center by Tom Prudhomme, NCSA's senior associate director for Applied Social Sciences, and Robert F. Rich, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rich is also a professor of law and holds appointments in the College of Medicine, the Department of Political Science, the Institute of Communications Research, and the Department of Community Health; he serves as a faculty fellow in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement and Institutional Relations.
NCSA™ (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
