Friedrich Summann is head of the IT Department of Bielefeld University Library. He worked for several innovative library projects in the past, among them were the first CD-ROM based library catalogue in Germany (1988), the state-wide electronic document delivery system for journal articles JASON (since 1993), a journal article database (since 1994) and the Digital Library NRW (1998-2001).

At the moment, the main topics of his work include search engine technology (BASE, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), the development of digital collections and the production of bibliographic databases. He is engaged with analysing and harvesting metadata from a multitude of different document servers world-wide using the OAI protocol and transporting this collected data to different search environments (library catalogue, article database and search engine based systems). This efforts led to many contacts within the OAI community associated with the discussion of technical problems and improvement of data quality in detail.

Additionally, he deals with establishing, adopting and improving institutional repository systems software and its workflow and user interface including the dissemination of the emerging metadata in this connection via the OAI interface. His practical work includes software developments using C, Perl, PHP and MySQL, mostly in a Linux and Unix environment.