Experience

• 

  Natural History Museum

  • United Kingdom
  • Museums, Historical Sites, and Zoos
  • 700 & Above Employee

  • Retired

    • Mar 2011 - Present

  • Collections Descriptions Coordinator

    • Jan 2009 - Mar 2011

    Partial retirememt, working 2 days per week developing documentation and training materials for users of the specimen collections management system, KE EMu. This work concentrated primarily on the Narratives module and included work with the oral history project managed by the Museum's Centre for Arts & Humanities Research.

  • Head of Data & Digital Systems

    • Jan 1985 - Dec 2009

    Full-time employment in a variety of roles setting up and developing the computing infrastructure for the Museum.Principle activities over this period include:• Managing the team responsible for the provision of computer-based information throughout the Natural History Museum and to its collaboration partners in the UK and abroad.• Leading the team that implemented the data network for the NHM, connecting it to the Internet and creating its Website – the first for a UK national museum.• Participating in the Dublin Core Testbed project managed by CIMI (the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information). This project tested the use of the (then) emerging Dublin Core metadata standard to "offline objects" such as are found in museums.• Collaborating with the emerging Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL – an international digital library http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ ) developing metadata principles and good practice.• Leading an international group to develop a metadata standard for interchanging information about natural history collections – Natural Collections Descriptions (NCD - http://www.tdwg.org/activities/ncd/ ). This standard evolved from the metadata standards that I helped to develop for the European Union funded BioCASE project. That project networked specimen information throughout Europe. The current incarnation of BioCASe (with lower-case "e") may be found at http://www.biocase.org/ - NCD itself is in use for the Biodiversity Collections Index at http://www.biodiversitycollectionsindex.org/ and a forthcoming project on field notebooks in the USA.• Establishing an imaging studio to create a digital record of the Museum’s extensive collection of original art, drawings and manuscripts.• Developing and presenting training and documentation for computer-based systems to Museum staff.• Leading the internal group developing strategy and policy for digital sustainability.

  • Systems Librarian

    • 1983 - 1985

    Procurement and implementation of the Museum's first computerised library catalogue.

  • Head of Reader Services, General Library

    • 1979 - 1983

    Management of the largest of the Museum's six on-site libraries.

  • Assistant Cataloguer

    • 1976 - 1979

    First of seven jobs and the Natural History Museum, cataloguing the new and existing books, maps and artwork using paper-based methods - no computers in those days!

• 

  London Borough of Camden

  • Library Assistant

    • 1972 - 1975

    Trainee librarian, sampling all types of public library work in the Borough's (then) 15 libraries.