Mogens founded Roskilde Festival and created Denmark’s first website

The year is 1971 and as vice-chairman of Roskilde Cathedral School’s student council and a member of the Union of Danish Upper Secondary School Students, 17-year-old Mogens Sandfær is fully engaged in the process of reforming high schools in Denmark. The spirit of the 1960s is still very much alive, and he and fellow student representatives have big ideas on how teaching can be improved and made more relevant.

However, the work requires money and to raise funds, he organizes lot of concerts and parties with music and beer sales. Things are going really well, so when a booking agent suggests expanding their activities with a festival à la Woodstock, they jump at the idea.

“It was actually what we’d been waiting for. We wanted to bring people together on a large scale in the hope that they would discuss how society could be improved,” says the now 63-year-old and slightly less rebellious Head of Research Analytics, Office for Research and Relations, who ended up sponsoring Roskilde Festival.

The festival attracted far more people than the organizers could ever have dreamed of and despite the socio-critical discussions taking a back seat to the holiday camp atmosphere, the festival itself proved incredibly viable—much to Mogens’ surprise. And he still goes there every year.

School of life

After high school, Mogens opted for philosophy. He was actually more interested in molecular biology, but with an upbringing from Risø and a father whose career was in agricultural genetics, he felt philosophy was a loftier and more rebellious choice.

“But I grew tired of formal philosophy. I was more interested in changing the world, but it didn’t look as though this was going to happen anytime soon within the scope of my studies,” he smiles.
He dropped out and became a labourer and took up political theatre in Brecht Gruppen—an ambitious amateur travelling theatre troupe.

The unemployment of the 1970s put an end to Mogens’ travelling days and instead of a job, he was offered a three-month stay at Krogerup Folk High School. Here, he gained new insights into art and debate—and the meeting with the school’s librarian inspired him to train as a public librarian. His grades, however, were ‘only’ good enough for a research librarian, which was not so bad. Here he learned about electronic data processing as it was known back then and this triggered an enduring spark in him.

World Wide Web

His first job was at Denmark’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Surveys (later DTU Aqua), where he built a database and library system. But he clearly saw that DTH was where all the action was and in 1987 he joined a major project to renew DTU Library’s IT systems.

Some years later, he took a leave of absence in order to perform the same task at CERN—The European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. He experimented with hyperlinks between databases, and when he presented this to CERN’s employees, a gentleman by the name of Tim Berners-Lee walked over and said that he had some ideas that might be of interest.

“Over lunch he explained that hyperlinks could be extrapolated in all directions using the internet. Back in those days, the internet was still in its infancy, but it wasn’t hard to imagine how Tim’s ideas could solve innumerable problems and link valuable information together. With the World Wide Web which Tim and his student assistants developed down in CERN’s basement, everyone could contribute information and create the links they liked in the common information universe—which in essence was very democratic.”

Mogens was so enthusiastic about the idea that he contacted CERN’s library board, offering to build their systems according to the www method. They did not back the idea, however, so it ended up being a free-time project for him and his team.

“The canteen was open 24/7 so you could just work as much as you wanted, which is quite a lot when you’re young and have seen the light. But we couldn’t release the system at CERN. Instead, the director of DTU’s Library stopped by and asked if we would set up the system there.”

In this way, DTU became the recipient of the first cloning of Tim Berners-Lee’s www-environment, Mogens and his team created Denmark’s first website, and DTU became the first university in the world with a searchable library on the web.

This was followed by several years where Mogens—in his capacity as manager for Nordic Net Centre—travelled up and down the Nordic countries with overheads and an audio tape recorder, preaching his vision of the digital future. Mogens was in his element as a travelling ‘evangelist’ and development manager at DTU Library, where he created lots of web-based systems and search engines.

Visionary developer

It might sound as if Mogens lives in a totally digitized world and has a sound grasp of mathematics and algorithms. But behind the strong glasses are eyes that do not always work in tandem with a computer display—so the office is still overflowing with papers of all kinds.

“Not everything in our home is computerized either. Admittedly, I’m nerdy—but not in all things. I’m just as happy gazing at a piece of art or any other tangible object as I am staring at a beautiful algorithm. I don’t live on bits and bytes, but on carrots, potatoes, and steaks,” says Mogens Sandfær.

While programming and mathematics are not his strong point, he does think in pictures and can easily sketch a coherent system so IT staff can visualize it. Ideas come to him in a continuous flow, and with his large network in university library world and a well-developed ability to formulate project applications, he has made a real difference.

In his 15 years as director and deputy director of DTU Library, Mogens has been a driving force in the development of the digital library with a focus on people and the environment—rather than on shelving units and books.

And now that he has swapped the library for the smaller Office for Research and Relations, he has taken the initiative for DEFF OPERA—a major project with participants from universities in Denmark and abroad aimed at raising research analyses to a new level using modern computer methods and network visualization.

The project will also incorporate new measuring points for open science in research analyses to make the field more visible—e.g. efforts to make software or research data available to others. Mogens is thus involved in several European forums, working to pave the way for a more accessible open science.

DTU career

His 35 years at DTU Library in no way reflect a lack of imagination on his part. It is simply that he never found anywhere else that offered him such excellent opportunities to pursue his many ideas.
“Here there’s plenty of room for differences and if you can sell your idea, there is usually support to carry it through,” he says.

Nor does he have any immediate plans to retire—rather he wants to become better at prioritizing and channelling his enthusiam and ideas so that his small office and department can reach its full potential.

“In the past, I’ve been more concerned with working than sleeping, but now I’ve become better at sleeping, which is no bad thing. You get so many good ideas.”