Michael Chapman was re-elected secretary of the association on February 23rd 2006.

A qualified systems administrator, Michael has been involved with the Virtual Library since the mid 1990s. Elected to its first Council when it became an association, and serving as its first treasurer.

He has been privileged to work closely with the late Bertrand Ibrahim (the "architect of the Virtual Library") and to see its re-birth under the direction of Raul Sanchez and Arthur Secret.

Dr Chapman's professional interests cover publishing (web and paper), particularly the generation of human readable material from databases (computer typesetting, topic maps, …) —on which he has taught and given papers. His work has involved Cyrillic and Asian language (CJK) material and the structuring of parallel texts (parallel translations) —interests seen in some of the VL catalogue pages.

In his spare time Michael enjoys surround sound and is particularly involved with moves to develop ambisonics as a practicable and widely accepted method for everyday rendering of audio. This includes work to develop software for manipulating ambisonic files.
He, also, serves as an administrateur (governor) of the Maison Familiale Rurale du Pays de Seyssel, which provides secondary and tertiary level education in alternance (apprenticeship and sandwich courses): Brevet, BacPro, BTS, ….

The photograph above shows Council at its meeting of October 2006. From left to right: Lisa Micah, Marion Julia, Raul Sanchez, Michael Chapman, Christian Savale and Arthur Secret.