The Future of the Past
Digitisation of Rare and Special Materials
Rare Books & Special Collections Group Conference 4th – 6th
September 2013, Canterbury Cathedral Lodge, Canterbury
Speakers
Simon Tanner is Director of Digital Consulting and Deputy Head of the Department of Digital
Humanities at King’s College London. He works with major cultural institutions across the
world to assist them to transform their collections and online presence. Simon founded the
Digital Futures Academy that has had participants from over 40 countries and run in the UK,
Australia and Africa. His personal research interests encompass digitisation, measuring
impact and assessing value in the digital domain. He co-authored Digital Futures: Strategies
for the Information Age with Marilyn Deegan and in 2011 wrote Inspiring Research, Inspiring
Scholarship: the value and benefits of digitised resources for learning, teaching and
enjoyment. In 2012, Simon published the Balanced Value Impact Model. He Tweets as
@SimonTanner and his blog is at http://simon-tanner.blogspot.co.uk/
Sian Prosser manages the Academic Services Development team at University of Warwick
Library, providing research and development support for library projects, primarily related to
e-learning. She completed her MA in Library and Information Studies at University College
London in 2011, following a graduate traineeship at Leeds University Library. While at Leeds,
she contributed to ongoing work to describe and plan the digitisation of fragments of
medieval manuscripts preserved in the bindings of books belonging to Ripon Cathedral
Library. In 2010 she completed a PhD thesis on the British Library manuscripts of the Old
French Roman de Troie, focusing on text-image relationships and evidence of scribal editing.
Rowenna Willard-Wright. Originally an Art Historian by training, Rowena has worked for
English Heritage in various roles since 1993, originally starting out as a cataloguing assistant.
Currently she is the Senior Curator for the South East of England and manages a team of
curators responsible for the collections, interiors and displays of 64 sites.
She has been the project curator for the Battle Abbey and Battlefield redisplay; Dover Castle
Dunkirk experience; and is currently working on the redisplay of the Swiss Cottage and
Museum at Osborne House, and the interiors at Walmer Castle.
Melissa Terras is Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor in Digital
Humanities in UCL's Department of Information Studies. With a background in Classical Art
History, English Literature, and Computing Science, her doctorate (Engineering Science,
University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies
to interpret and read Roman texts. Publications include "Image to Interpretation: Intelligent
Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts" (2006, Oxford University
Press) and "Digital Images for the Information Professional" (2008, Ashgate). She is the
secretary of the European Association for Digital Humanities, and on the board of the
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations. Her research focuses on the use of
computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would
otherwise be impossible. You can generally find her on twitter @melissaterras.
Catherine Richardson is a Reader in Renaissance Studies at the University of Kent, where
she arrived in 2007 from the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the material
experience of daily life in early modern England – on the way material and textual cultures
relate to one another; on things and spaces and the stories people tell about them. She is
editor of several books on material culture including, with Tara Hamling, Everyday Objects:
medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (2010), and author of
Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy: the material life of the household (2006) and
Shakespeare and Material Culture (2011). She is currently half way through a jointlyauthored monograph for Yale (also with Tara Hamling) called A Day at Home in Early Modern
England: The Materiality of Domestic Life, 1500-1700 (2015), underpinned by an AHRC
network grant on perceptions of the domestic interior
(http://www.kent.ac.uk/mems/domestic%20interior.html).
Dr Richard Guest is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering and Digital Arts at the
University of Kent. His research interests include: image processing, document analysis and
handwriting assessment for biometric and forensic assessment. He is currently PI for a
number of national and international research projects across these fields.
Alixe Bovey is an art historian specialising in medieval illuminated manuscripts. After a BA at
the University of Victoria, she completed an MA and PhD at the Courtauld Institute. Before
joining the University of Kent, where she is senior lecturer in medieval history and director
of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, she spent four years as a curator of
manuscripts at the British Library, where she worked on the Catalogue of Illuminated
Manuscripts. Over the past year she has campaigned to save the Mendham Collection,
which is being broken up by the Law Society of England and Wales.
James P. Carley is an associate fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in the
University of Toronto as well as professor of the history of the book at the University of
Kent. An honorary research fellow at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford he is also a senior fellow
at Massey College. His most recent book was the first in a two-volume edition, translation
and commentary of John Leland's De uiris illustribus. He is also working on a three-volume
history of the early history of Lambeth Palace Library which has been outlined in the Sandars
Lectures in Bibliography he gave at the University of Cambridge in 2011.
Anne Welsh is Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London,
where she teaches Cataloguing, Advanced Cataloguing and Historical Bibliography. She is
also Departmental Careers Tutor and will be Acting Programme Director for the MA LIS in
term 2 this year, covering Professor Broughton's sabbatical. She has been a member of UCL
Centre for Digital Humanities since its launch in 2010. Her co-authored book 'Practical
Cataloguing' (Facet, 2012; Neal Schumann, 2012) is a core text on both sides of the Atlantic
and 'Cataloguing and Decision Making' is due out later this year / early 2014. Her main
research at the moment is focused on the Working Library of Walter de la Mare, one of
Senate House's special collections.
Professor Nicholas Pickwoad has a doctorate from Oxford University in English Literature.
He trained in bookbinding and book conservation with Roger Powell, and ran his own
workshop from 1977 to 1989. He has been Adviser on book conservation to the National
Trust of Great Britain since 1978, and was editor of the Paper Conservator. He taught book
conservation at Columbia University Library School in New York from 1989 to 1992 and was
Chief Conservator in the Harvard University Library from 1992 to 1995. He is now project
leader of the St Catherine’s Monastery Library Project based at the University of the Arts,
London and is director of the Ligatus Research Centre, which is dedicated to the history of
bookbinding. He gave the 2008 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library, was awarded the 2009
Plowden medal for Conservation and is a Fellow of the IIC and of the Society of Antiquaries
and a Council Member of the Bibliographical Society of Great Britain. He also teaches
courses in the UK, Europe and America on the history of European bookbinding in the era of
the hand printing press, and has published widely on the subject.
Geoff Browell is a senior archivist at King’s College London, with extensive experience of
digitisation and the use of technology in public engagement. He manages the popular AIM25
platform, which aggregates descriptions of archives held in London and is a partnership of
130 cultural institutions. Recent projects include King’s contribution to the Wellcome Trustfunded Codebreakers digitisation programme on the history of the discovery of the structure
of the DNA double helix; the development and implementation of a new type of collection
management system for archives; the implementation of Linked Data initiatives in the UK
and the development of smart phone apps.
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