Biographies

This legacy information on our earlier conference in 2003 is included for reference and research purposes.

Sarah Tyacke

Sarah Tyacke is Keeper of Public Records for the United Kingdom Government and Chief Executive of the Public Record Office of England and Wales 1992. Now responsible for the construction of The National Archives which will incorporate the PRO and the Historical Manuscripts Commission from April 2003. Director of Special Collections, British Library 1986-91; Vice President of the International Council on Archives 1996-2000, President of the Hakluyt Society 1997-2002. A Governor of the London Metropolitan University since 2003.

She is responsible for the strategic approach to records management and digital records in government, now part of the Modernising Government agenda, implementation of the Freedom of Information Act 2005, and previously for building the New Public Record Office at Kew, which opened in December 1995, and for the award winning Family Records Centre in Central London, which opened in April 1997. The PRO is a Charter Mark and an Investor In People organisation.

She established the overall 'Documents Online' programme to provide the records and information about them to the world. Current products are the award winning 'Learning Curve,' an educational web site for schools and colleges on history, the Access to Archives (A2A) programme for the country's archives and their researchers of all sorts, the New Opportunity Funded (NOF) digital site on immigration history to this country , 'Moving Here' as well as our own 'Pathways to History' which celebrates our histories and, of course, the genealogical sites 'Familyrecords.gov.uk' and the famous 1901 census website.

Chris Kitching

Chris Kitching is Secretary of the Historical Manuscripts Commission which becomes part of The National Archives on 2 April. He was appointed Secretary in 1992, having previously been the Commission's Assistant Secretary from 1982 to 1992, and before that an Assistant Keeper at the Public Record Office. He is Chairman of the British Standards Institution's subcommittee on Document Preservation, most recently responsible for preparing BS 5454: 2000, Recommendations for the storage and exhibition of archival documents. He was previously chairman of the International Council on Archives commission on descriptive standards, responsible for the first editions of the two archive cataloguing standards ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF). His publications include Archive buildings in the United Kingdom 1977-1992 (HMSO, 1993), Archives. The very essence of our heritage (Phillimore for the NCA, 1996) and many articles and reviews.

Peter B. Hirtle

Peter B. Hirtle is Director for Instruction and Learning in the Instruction, Research, and Information Services Division of the Cornell University Library. He as also served at Cornell as Director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections and as the Associate Editor of D-Lib Magazine, a monthly magazine about innovation and research in digital libraries. Hirtle has also worked at the National Archives and Records Administration and at the National Library of Medicine. He is currently serving as President of the Society of American Archivists. Hirtle has an MA in History and a MLS with a concentration in archival studies.

Ólafur Ásgeirsson

Ólafur Ásgeirsson, historian, was born in Reykjavik 1947. He has been National Archivist of Iceland since 1984 and has held various responsibilities for the International Council on Archives since 1993. In 2000 he became Chair of the first ICA Committee on Information Technology.

Doron Swade

Doron Swade is an electronics/computer engineer, an historian and a museum professional. Until recently he was Assistant Director & Head of Collections at the National Museum of Science and Industry, London, where his responsibilities included the Library, Archives and Documentation. He has studied physics, electronics, philosophy of science, machine intelligence, and history, at various universities. For over a decade he designed computer-based informational exhibits for museums, and consulted for the computer industry. He was Senior Curator of Computing at the Science Museum for fourteen years, and has published over fifty scholarly and popular articles and three books, on curatorship, museology and history of technology.

Paul Wheatley

Paul studied Computer Science at the University of Leeds and has since worked in a variety of roles including computer games programmer, freelance journalist and systems analyst at the British Library. In recent years, Paul has worked as part of the digital preservation team at the University of Leeds, working on the Cedars and CAMiLEON projects. Paul is currently the Project Manager of the Representation and Rendering project.

Andy Finney

Andy Finney started his professional career in old media - radio - and has moved into newer and newer territory ever since. While at the BBC he introduced interactivity to BBC television and was a producer on the BBC's Domesday Project in the mid-80s, responsible for much of the material on the National Disc including the surrogate walks (an early form of virtual reality) and the news clips from the 80s.

Since leaving the BBC he worked for the Multimedia Corporation and then in companies of his own. He is co-author, with Elaine England, of 'Managing Multimedia', the standard textbook on management of new media projects. He is a past chair of the British Interactive Media Associaiton, which he helped to form in the mid-80s, and is currently a member of the BIMA Executive. Among his current projects are review work for the European Commission, management of a web site on digital television and an online discography.

Adrian Pearce

Adrian Pearce BSc CEng MBCS has over thirty years experience in infomation systems design, management and consultancy in software and hardware companies, local government, university and industry. He enjoys a hands on approach to problem solving and was offered the opportunity to borrow a working BBC Domesday system with the challenge to make the data available on current hardware. Sixteen months later the Community laserdisc data is alive and running on a PC.

Adrian Brown

After studying Medieval Literature at the University of Durham, Adrian Brown worked as a field archaeologist before joining English Heritage in 1994. Based at the Centre for Archaeology in Portsmouth, he was responsible for managing the CfA's archaeological archives and other information resources. During this time, he developed and implemented a digital archiving programme, designed to enable the long-term preservation and re-use of the CfA's extensive and diverse digital collections. In 2001 he was appointed Head of Information Management and Collections. He moved to the Digital Preservation Department of the The National Archives, as Digital Archives Analyst, in November 2002.

Jacqueline Slats

After her study in Information Management Jacqueline worked for 7 years at the computer centre of the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water management. In 1994, she joined the Dutch State Archive Service, where she was responsible for different Information Technology projects. Since October 2000, she is the program manager of the Digital Preservation Testbed, which is sponsored by the Dutch State Archive Service and the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations.

Jan Danielsen

Since 1995 Jan Danielsen has participated in the theoretical and practicalhandling of electronic archives. Since 1998 as a special consultant and IT-manager in the IT-department with the responsibility of long term preservation of electronic archives and the development of standards and regulations for delivery to the Danish State Archives. Jan is currently working with the specification of a common EDM system for the Danish Administration. He has for a period functioned as a consultant for The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in digitising paper records. Jan Danielsen has a master's degree in Computer Science and Geography.

Adrian Williams

Adrian Williams is Preservation Manager at BBC Information & Archives. He started working at the BBC in 1985 and has fulfilled several different roles, mostly based around film, videotape and audio technical operations. He has have been directly involved with media preservation for the last seven years and, as the Preservation Manager, looks after the production process and quality control. The formats the BBC is currently preserving are 1" and U-Matic videotape, 16mm Ektachrome and SepMag film and a variety of audio formats covering many years of radio output.

David Ryan

David Ryan is Head of Archive Services at The National Archives. He is currently developing its digital preservation strategy, and is also responsible for Archive Production Services (formerly Repository) and Conservation departments.

Before joining The National Archives, David was Head of Information Management at Pfizer Ltd. where he developed and introduced a major change programme in the management of electronic records. He began his career as Curator of Maritime Records at Merseyside Maritime Museum. After graduating from King's College, London, he gained a Diploma in Archive Studies from University College, London.

From November 2004, David Ryan no longer works at the National Archives. For enquiries, please contact: digital-archive@nationalarchives.gov.uk

David Thomas

David Thomas is Director of Government and Archive Services at the National Archives and is responsible for records management, preservation and conservation. He joined the Public Record Office in 1974 and has been Head of e-Access and Information and Communication Technology. Current projects include conducting a review of the Office's storage of large datasets and the investigation of cross-government tracking of freedom of information applications. He has studied history at London University and IT at the Open University.

Kevin Schürer

Kevin Schürer is Director of the UK Data Archive and Professor in History at the University of Essex, and Director of the new ESRC/JISC funded Economic and Social Data Service. Trained in history and geography his research interests bridge the humanities and social sciences. He worked in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure for ten years prior to moving to a post in the Data Archive at Essex. Following a spell in the History Department at Essex he returned to the Data Archive as Director in 2000. He has written or edited five books on historical demography and the history of the family as well as a number of journal articles. He also writes on issues relating to digital preservation having compiled consultancy reports on this subject for the PRO and the European Union. He is a member of the Society of Archivists and an Academician to the Academy for the Social Sciences.

Deborah Woodyard

Deborah Woodyard is the Digital Preservation Coordinator at The British Library in London. She began working on the preservation of digital materials in 1996 at the National Library of Australia and joined the British Library in January 2001. Deborah conducts a wide variety of internal and external digital preservation work, such as developing preservation metadata for implementation, participating in the BL core development team for long term digital storage solutions and chairs the Digital Preservation Coalition Special Interest Group on Web Archiving.

Shelby Sanett

Shelby Sanett coordinates the activities of Amigos' Imaging & Preservation Services (IPS), a non-profit, grant-funded service providing preservation information, support and training to librarians and archivists in the Southwestern US, primarily Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. IPS provides information, disaster planning and recovery assistance, training and site surveys, as well as developing state and local cooperative networks and serving as an advocate for preservation regionally and nationally.

Shelby holds an MLIS degree from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She is an investigator on the InterPARES Project where her research interest is in the area of preservation policy. She also holds an MBA from the University of Phoenix.

Shelby has made numerous presentations at regional, state, and national library and archive conferences and library schools, published recent articles on preservation of electronic records, and presented talks on her research at conferences in the United States and Europe.

David Bowen

David Bowen trained as a chemist at Cambridge and London, and began working with computers in 1968. He worked in medical and pharmaceutical research in the USA, and then with Pfizer in the UK. He began working on digital preservation issues in the 1980s, and was part of the team that built Pfizer's electronic archive in the early 1990s. Since 1998 he has been with Audata, where he has worked on a variety of information management projects, including digital preservation projects with industrial clients, and with The National Archives.

Hans Hofman

Hans Hofman is co-director of ERPANET and senior advisor at The National Archives of the Netherlands. In the latter position he is involved in the government program 'Digital Longevity' concerning digital records and information management. This program, initiated in 1996 by the ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the ministry of the Interior, has as objective to establish electronic record keeping policies within government. On the international scene he is involved in the European funded ERPANET project that aims to enhance the preservation of digital objects (www.erpanet.org), and furthermore he is co-investigator and representative of the National Archives in the Inter Pares 2 research project, (since 2000) the representative of the Netherlands in the ISO TC46/SC11 on Records Management, and member of the DLM-Monitoring Group within the European Union (since 1996). He has given numerous presentations and written many articles on topics like digital preservation, recordkeeping metadata and electronic records management.

Claes Gränström

Claes Gränström studied Latin, Classical Archaeology and History at the University of Lund and wrote his thesis about sources in Swedish medieval history. In 1969 he moved to the National Archives in Stockholm. At present he is Deputy Director General of the National Archives. He has, in recent years, worked with the problems and possibilities of electronic records from various aspects such as record life cycle, appraisal, cataloguing, availability, security, sensitivity and integrity. For the purpose he has in various capacities taken part in the work of several government committees, which have dealt, amongst other things, with freedom of information act legislation, privacy and data protection legislation, copyright and archival legislation, mainly concerning electronic information. He is currently Chairman of the ICA (International Council on Archives) Committee on archival legal matters, member of ICA Committee for Programme Management, chair of the DLM-Network Monitoring Committee and DLM-Network Steering Committee.

Neil Beagrie

Neil Beagrie is Programme Director for Digital Preservation JISC UK. He is responsible for developing JISC policy, guidance to institutions, and collaborative programmes, for digital preservation and/or electronic records and digital collection management on behalf of the Higher and Further Education Councils and institutions in the UK. 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. He has co-ordinated the development of a Digital Preservation Coalition in the UK and became its first Company Secretary. He was previously Assistant Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service. At the AHDS he developed digital collections policy and standards and published extensively on digital preservation issues. He was joint author with Daniel Greenstein of the study "A Strategic Policy Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections". Prior to joining the AHDS in 1997, he was Head of Archaeological Archives and Library at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and was active there in developing national data standards and collection management for archaeological and architectural records.

Dr Duncan Simpson

Dr Duncan Simpson was until 2002 a Director of the Public Record Office in London. His responsibilities included advising government departments on electronic records management systems and the development of the PRO's plans for long term digital preservation.

He was a member of the ICA's Information Technology Committee, with a particular interest in digital preservation, and had previously been a member of its archive buildings and equipment committee. He now works as a consultant, and is a Senior Research Fellow of University College London and an associate of its Constitution Unit, which specialises in FOI, Data Protection, records management and related matters. He is also working with The National Archives, as part of its records and archives legislation project team.

Jeff Rothenberg

Jeff Rothenberg is a noted computer science researcher who has been investigating digital longevity since 1991, working with archivists, librarians, and others in the U.S. and Europe. He published a widely-cited article in Scientific American on the subject in 1995 and appeared in the documentary film "Into the Future" in 1998. Over the past few years, he has worked with the Dutch National Archives - recommending a strategy for long-term digital preservation of archival records - and has helped the Dutch National Library develop a strategy for long-term preservation of its deposit holdings.