Memories for Life


	Home > Network > Core Members > Neil Beagrie		Neil Beagrie is responsible for developing and managing partnership activities between the UK Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library, a post he took up in early January 2004. Prior to this he was a Programme Director in JISC developing 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 directed 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. 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. In the last 12 months these have included invitations from: The Chinese National Academy of Sciences; JSTOR; JISC and Coalition for Networked Information (CNI); Pacific Neighbourhood Consortium; American Society for Information Science and Technology; UNESCO and Belgian Association for Documentation; UNESCO and National Library of Austria; Mellon Foundation and the New York Public Library; Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and Foundation for Science and Technology; and the Royal Chemical Society. WWW home page Email this Member

	My interest in M4L stem from my background in archaeology and the curation of digital culture and scientific records in archives, libraries, and data centres. My research interests and expertise lie in long-term curation, preservation and access to digital collections within institutions, and in personal digital collections. In previous centuries physical artefacts such as journals, diaries, personal libraries, photographs and correspondence have been critical to individual and collective memory. Similarly trusted individual specialists and institutions have been vital to the transmission of such memories over time. I believe M4L research will benefit from the study of, and practice learned from, the transmission and use of physical artefacts and oral tradition. At the same time digital memory poses a number of challenges for individuals and “memory institutions” and these challenges will grow as digital memory increasingly replaces physical artefacts. As a result they may benefit substantially from M4L research.