George Brett serves as Director of the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) in the Information Technologies Division of MCNC. The Center is an international clearinghouse for the development and support of software applications for the utilization of networked resources. The work of the CNIDR is funded through a cooperative agreement between the National Science Foundation and MCNC, with funding from other federal agencies for special projects (e.g., National Library of Medicine, US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research.)

Brett has been working since 1989 on issues of networked information resource discovery, access, and utilization with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the EDUCOM Educational Uses of Information Technologies (EUIT), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), as well as other international organizations. He has spoken on this matter to groups such as the Global Communications Seminar at the Commission of the European Community, Brussels, Belgium, The Faxon Institute for Advanced Studies in Scholarly and Scientific Communications, Reston, VA, and the Telecommunications in Mathematics and Science Education Workshop sponsored by the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET), Crystal City, VA.

He was a Citizen Delegate from North Carolina to the Second White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. Previous to his current position Brett spent 9 years managing support for all levels of academic computing for the seventeen institutions of the University of North Carolina system.