HomeResearch Partners and Project Team
We have brought together a strong consortium of partners and individuals with complementary interests and skills.
The British Library holds the UK’s largest research collections and has an established international profile in longterm collection development and preservation of scholarly collections and personal papers. This includes personal collections in manuscript, audio, and increasingly digital form. In October 2006 it hosted an international conference, Manuscripts Matter, which included a panel on eMANUSCRIPTS. It is working closely with partners in many international and UK research projects. It is the lead organisation for the European Commission funded PLANETS digital preservation research project. In December 2006 it hosted and co-sponsored with the Memories for Life research network the colloquium Memories for Life: a future for our pasts, focusing on digital memory.
The Centre for IT and Law (CITL), University of Bristol, is a pioneering centre dedicated to tackling the new legal challenges associated with the fast-moving world of information technology. It is a cross-disciplinary venture, building on existing strengths in the School of Law and Department of Computer Science. The Centre is supported by an Advisory Group of international businesses and legal experts. Vodafone Group Services Limited, Barclaycard, Herbert Smith, Hewlett Packard Laboratories and the Law Society Charitable Trust have all invested in the new Centre to find solutions to legal problems created by new technology. The Centre's main areas of research are in the fields of privacy, digital rights management, cybercrime and e-commerce.
The School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies at University College London is an international centre for knowledge creation and transfer in the library, archive, electronic publishing and information science fields. It brings together an outstanding team of researchers, teachers, students, practitioners and information industry leaders to create exciting opportunities for developing the new understanding and insights needed to shape the emerging information environment of the twenty-first century while elucidating and building on the historical developments that have created this environment. Its staff expertise spans librarianship, archives, records and information management, traditional and electronic publishing, information policy, humanities computing, artificial intelligence and historical studies.
Jeremy Leighton John (British Library: Principal Investigator, 1 April 2008 onwards; team member since beginning of the project)
Dr Jeremy Leighton John has been Curator of eMANUSCRIPTS and Scientific Curator in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the British Library since 2003, having been Specialist Curator for the W. D. Hamilton Archive from 2000. Previously he worked as a cataloguer of bioacoustic collections in the British Library Sound Archive. In 1996 he completed a DPhil in Zoology at Merton College, Oxford. He is a member of the Library Committee of the Royal Society, and of the Advisory Committee of the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists. He is also a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and of the Royal Geographical Society, and is a member of the British Society for the History of Science. During his career, he has won several scholarships and prizes, including one for writing, has conducted both field and theoretical research, and has given talks and published articles on scientific, archival and historical topics, in both scholarly and popular forms. In recent years he has been working with hybrid (digital and analogue) collections of living as well as deceased scientists; and having first learned to program at University College London, with FORTRAN using punched cards, he has been adapting technologies and procedures for forensically capturing, authenticating and making available the digital equivalent of analogue personal archives and manuscripts.
Katrina Dean (British Library: Coinvestigator)
Dr Katrina Dean joined the British Library as Curator of the History of Science in January 2006 with a remit to develop, interpret and coordinate the history of science collections and is also responsible for the oversight of eMSS. She is a member of the British Society for the History of Science and the Advisory Board of e-BLJ, the British Library's research journal. She was previously employed by the University of Bristol (2004-2005) as a Leverhulme postdoctoral researcher on a collaborative project to document the history of 20th-century scientific exploration of Antarctica, working closely with contemporary British scientific archives in analogue and digital format. Before completing her PhD (2000-2004) on history of science at the University of Cambridge she worked at the National Archives of Australia (1996-1999) on the survey and design of recordkeeping systems and archival appraisal of electronic and paper government records, and on secondment as a Field Officer for the Australian Science Archives Project (1996-1997), identifying and cataloguing the personal archives of scientists and developing online content. She has published on the history of science and scientific archives in scholarly journals.
Ian Rowlands (UCL: Coinvestigator)
Dr Ian Rowlands is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at UCL and director of research for the UCL Centre for Publishing. His main teaching and research interests lie in the broad area of scholarly communication and public information policy. Before becoming an academic, Ian spent the first 10 years of his professional career as an information management consultant and project manager, working with a wide variety of organisations in the commercial, not-for-proft and international governmental bodies on complex research projects. Ian has particular expertise in the design, commissioning and analysis of large-scale opinion surveys and he works extensively with GfK NOP. He is the author of more than 70 publications in the library and information literature.
Jamie Andrews (British Library)
Jamie Andrews is Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library, where he has overall responsibility, under the Head of Western Manuscripts, for the Library’s collections of Modern Literary and Theatrical Manuscripts in Western European languages. He is closely involved in national strategies to retain and preserve literary manuscripts ((including eMANUSCRIPTS) of contemporary authors in the UK, and is a committee member of the Working Group on UK Literary Heritage (chaired by Lord Howarth of Newport) and the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts. He is on the steering group for the national Authors’ Lives oral history project, the collaborative Theatre Archive Project with Sheffield University, and the collaborative Buried Treasures project with Royal Holloway, University of London.
Andrew Charlesworth (University of Bristol)
Andrew Charlesworth has been Senior Research Fellow in IT and Law, and Director of the Centre for IT and Law (CITL) at the University of Bristol since 2002, having previously been Senior Lecturer in IT Law and Director of the Information Law & Technology Unit at the University of Hull. The Centre for IT and the Law at Bristol is sponsored by Herbert Smith LLP, Vodafone Group Services Ltd, Barclaycard, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, and the Law Society Charitable Trust. He has been involved with numerous curation, preservation, and archive projects including providing advice on legal issues to: the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS); the Consortium of University Research Libraries Exemplars in Digital Archives (CEDARS); Creative Archiving at Michigan & Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New (CAMiLEON); and the JISC-funded BioMed Image Archive. Both the AHDS and BioMed work including the development of a rights management framework and deposit and use agreements. He is currently Principal Investigator on the JISC Study to Explore the Legal & Records Management Issues Relating to the Concept of the Lifelong Learner Record, which is investigating the legal and ethical issues surrounding the development of institutional and personal digital collection tools, such as ePortfolios, in the educational context. He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Information Law and Technology and of the Executive Committee of the British & Irish Legal Education Technology Association (BILETA), as well as an Honorary Member of the Data Protection Research and Policy Group at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.
Alison Hill (British Library)
Alison Hill has worked in the British Library for 19 years and has worked increasingly with Internet projects. She has been working in the new post of Curator of the Web Collections since 2004. This job involves specifying the scope for the selection of websites in the UK and managing the web archiving process. She works in collaboration with the head of Modern British Collections on the current British Library policy for the collection development of websites (PDF). She currently chairs the Collection Development Group within the UK Web Archiving Consortium.
Rory McLeod (British Library)
Rory McLeod is the Digital Preservation Manager for Collection Care at the British Library. Rory is part of a new Digital Preservation team whose role it is to provide information to guide policy development for Digital Preservation based on the testing and evaluation of the Library's evolving digital collections. His background is in project management specialising in information technology, digitisation and service analysis. Rory is currently also fulfilling the role of Project Manager for the LIFE project, a research project which has developed a methodology to cost Digital Preservation for both National and Higher Education libraries.
David Nicholas (UCL: Digital Lives project board)
Professor David Nicholas is Director of the School, Chair of Library and Information Studies, School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS), University College London. SLAIS is known as the ‘information rainbow' school because of the wide range of information subjects, including publishing, it covers. He is also Director of Ciber (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) and Director of the UCL Centre for Publishing. Previously he was Head, Department of Information Science, City University; and previous to that MA Course Tutor, School of Information and Communication Studies, University of North London.
Robert Perks (British Library)
Dr Robert Perks has been Curator of Oral History at the British Library Sound Archive since 1988, and Director of National Life Stories since 1996. He is the secretary of the Oral History Society, a member of the US Oral History Association’s International Committee, an Expert Advisor to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), and acts as an advisor to Qualidata (ESRC Qualitative Data Archival Resource Centre) at the University of Essex, and The Centre for Life History Research at the University of Sussex. He is a Board Member of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council South East (MLASE). An editor of Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society, his publications include Oral History, Health and Welfare (Routledge, 2000), The Oral History Reader (Routledge, 1998, second edition 2006), Ukraine’s Forbidden History (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998), Oral History: Talking about the Past (Historical Association, second edition 1995), An Introduction to the Use of Oral History in Medicine (NLSC/Wellcome Trust, 1993) and Voices of the Holocaust: a cross-curricular resource pack (British Library, 1993). He is also an editorial board member of the Journal of the Society of Archivists. He was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 1992 to research nationalism, memory and oral history in Eastern Europe, and acted as a special historical advisor for the Council of Europe in Romania. He was Co-ordinator of the Millennium Oral History Project (“Millennium Memory Bank”), a collaborative initiative between the British Library and BBC Regional Broadcasting, and the largest oral history project ever mounted in Britain.
Paul Wheatley (British Library)
Paul Wheatley is a specialist in digital preservation and works for the British Library. He is educated in Computer Science and has previously worked as a technology journalist and software developer. Paul played a leading role in various collaborative digital preservation developments at the University of Leeds. He has worked on the seminal Cedars project and led the Camileon project which gained international recognition for its role in rescuing the BBC Domesday system using emulation technology. Paul is currently the Digital Preservation Manager in the eIS Directorate of the British Library, and a member of the team responsible for ensuring the longevity of the Library's digital collections. He is heavily involved in the European Union-funded PLANETS digital preservation project and will draw on his work on new technologies there in contributing to work package 4 in the Digital Lives project.
Peter Williams (UCL)
Peter Williams has spent the last 11 years investigating the use of the Internet and other ICT applications in the fields of education, health, and the news media, at City University, the University of East London (UEL), and University College London (UCL), to where he is returning after completing an ESRC-funded project at UEL. This looked at exploiting ICT to help adolescents with severe learning disabilities create electronic profiles of themselves as aids to communication and self-advocacy skills. In addition to his current post on the Digital Lives project, he is an honorary research fellow at UCL and a research associate at UEL. Peter has published extensively in the fields of information science and education.
Moved on
Neil Beagrie (British Library: Principal Investigator, 3 September 2007 – 7 December 2007)
Neil Beagrie’s first research and early career were in archaeology and traditional archive and library management. His career now spans a range of senior information management roles including Programme Director for Digital Preservation at the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, Director and Assistant Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and Head of Archaeological Archives and Library at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. He is internationally recognised for his work on digital curation and digital preservation within the library and data communities and is regularly invited to give keynote presentations or chair sessions at conferences in the UK and internationally. He has extensive experience of programme and project management and leading collaborative project and research teams and has published extensively on digital preservation and digital library issues. He was research director and co-author of the study Preservation Management of Digital Materials: A Handbook published by the British Library in November 2001 and was joint author and co-investigator with Daniel Greenstein of the study A Strategic Policy Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections. He was the international consultant to the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and his study National Digital Preservation Initiatives was published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress. He has also published over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and other professional publications. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; a Fellow of the British Cartographic Society; and an honorary research fellow in the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies at University College London; a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Digital Asset Management; a member of the EPSRC funded Memories for Life research network; and a member of the external advisory panel for the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield.
John Tuck (British Library: Digital Lives project board; acting project leader, 8 December 2007 – 31 March 2008)
John is currently Director of Library Services at the Royal Holloway College of the University of London. Between October 2002 and March 2008, he was Head of British Collections at British Library where he was responsible for the web archiving programme and was chair of the UK Web Archiving Consortium; previously he was Deputy to the Director of University Library Services and to Bodley’s Librarian, University of Oxford (1998-2002); before that he worked in various capacities at the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester (1977-1997), finally as Joint Deputy Librarian.