Frank Roos has almost 20 years experience in library and information work. He graduated in 1975 from the University of Utrecht with a MSc (Chemistry; infrared spectroscopy, computational quantum chemistry). Article: "The quantum-mechanical calculation of force constants using rectilinear and curvilinear coordinates. The quadratic CNDO force field of HCF3", W.M.A. Smit and F.A. Roos, Molecular Physics, 36(1978)4, pp. 1017 - 1023.
From the University of Amsterdam he obtained a certificate of postgraduate studies in scientific librarianship. He followed (i.a.) a 12 weeks full-time course on International Relations organised by the Netherlands Institute of International Relations 'Clingendael', and the advanced course on Management for Non-Profit Organisations by ISBW.
Frank Roos held positions with several subsequent employers: the University of Utrecht (research at the infrared spectroscopy dept), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (assistant spokesman at the press office), the Prins Maurits Laboratory (head Information and Documentation) of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Science TNO. Since 1984 he is holding a tenured position at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), till the end of 2000 as head of the Library and Information Service. In 2000 Frank Roos was seconded to CWI's spin-out company Eidetica that provided advanced text mining services. From 2001 till 2007 he was CWI's funding officer and held also the position of manager of the W3C Benelux Office. As from 2007 Frank is executive officer, advisor of the general director, and executive secretary of CWI's board.
Frank took part in the RIDDLE project, sponsored by the Libraries Programme of the European Communities' Telematics Programme. The project was aiming in 1995 at creating a subset of SGML for data capture for online catalogs of libraries; in a way a precursor of XML that was conceptualised some years later in 1998 and will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2008. Article on RIDDLE: "(Semi) automatic capturing of bibliographic information from journal contents pages for inclusion in online library catalogues: the RIDDLE Project", A.D. Harrison, F.A. Roos, R.E. Thomas, The Electronic Library, 13(1995)1, pp. 15 - 19.
Frank participated in some "Dublin Core" workshops aiming at developing a metadata standard for resource discovery on the Internet, an activity preliminary to later W3C's Semantic Web Activity. He co-initiated and chaired the LOBBI consortium of the mathematics and computer science libraries in the Netherlands. He also participated in the DELOS (ERCIM Digital Library) of the ERCIM consortium of which CWI is a founding member. Article: "ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library", Stefania Biagioni, Jose Luis Borbinha, Reginald Ferber, Preben Hansen, Sarantos Kapidakis, Laszlo Kovacs, Frank Roos, Anne-Marie Vercoustre, In: Nikolaou, C. and Stephanidis, C. (eds.), 2nd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries - ECDL 1998. 19-23 September, 1998. Heraklion, Crete, Greece. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1513, Berlin: Springer, 1998, pp. 905-906.
In 1998 he got involved in the EULER project of the European Mathematical Society that was sponsored by the Libraries Programme of the European Union.
As a consultant Frank Roos wrote advisory reports on restructuring library and information services of some libraries, and on (digital) library cooperation. In 2007 he was secretary of the midterm review committee of the Bsik project BRICKS.