Dirk Pieper is head of the Acquisition Department and the Digital Library Coordinator of Bielefeld University Library. With an academic background in political sciences and economics he started his library career at Bielefeld UL with the Digital Library NRW project in 1998. In 1999 he worked at the Distance University Hagen where he dealt among other things with the integration of digital library services and virtual learning environments. In 2000 he came to Paderborn UL in order to establish the Aleph 500 local library system there and then returned to Bielefeld UL in 2004 where he took over the coordination of the BASE project with Friedrich Summann.