Resumé

Hello.

I have over fifteen years’ experience working in the cultural heritage sector, with a particular expertise in developing digitisation programmes, looking after digital collections, interpretation and outreach, and managing digital learning projects.

Skills and experience

• Consultancy on digital collections and digitisation projects
• Experience working with sensitive materials in an archival context, and decolonising museum and library collections
• Commissioning, writing and editing online content
• Academic research
• Cataloging to archival standards
• Copyright and IP in a cultural heritage collections
• Digital imaging
• Digital preservation

Clients, partnerships, publications

I’ve produced work for:

• BBC Films
• British Library
• The Eden Project
• Msheireb Museums
• National Maritime Museum Cornwall
• National Museum of Qatar
• Public Domain Review
• Qatar Digital Library
• Royal Academy of Music
• Royal Horticultural Society
• University of Glasgow
• University of Oxford
• Urban History journal

Work history

Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library (2019-present)

I’m presently managing a Heritage Fund digitisation project, photographing hundreds of manuscripts, artworks and other collection items, for publication on a new RHS digital collections site, launching 2021.

Discovering Sacred Texts, The British Library (2018-19)

I project-managed the British Library’s digital learning resource, Discovering Sacred Texts, launched in September 2019. The resource is designed for GCSE and A level Religious Studies students and teachers, and offers a mix of articles written by academic experts and religious leaders, video content, digitised collection items and teachers’ resources.

Qatar Digital Library (2013-18)

The Qatar Digital Library is the fruits of a partnership between the British Library and Qatar National Library. Thousands of documents from the India Office Records have been digitised and published online in this groundbreaking project.

In the five years that I worked on the project, I catalogued collection items, commissioned, wrote and edited content for the ‘Articles from our Experts’ section of the site, and contributed to the development of a complex digitisation workflow.

My own contributions to the ‘Articles from our Experts’ section of the Qatar Digital Library include:

• Diplomacy, Disease and Death: the Story of Georgian Slaves in the Gulf
• German Interests in the Gulf’s Pearling Industry
• Mombasa: Britain’s shortest-lived Protectorate?
• Britain’s ineffectual Efforts to suppress the Slave Trade
• Telegraphs and Typewriters: the Impact of Technology on Bookkeeping at Bushire
• Crime or Punishment: the Cruel Death of a Sailor at Bushire in 1820
• Between Freedom and Slavery: the Employment of runaway Slaves in the Indian Navy
• The Indigo Trade in the Gulf in the Nineteenth Century
• A Demonstration of British Firepower on the Trucial Coast, 1949
• Negotiating the Origins of the Gulf’s Aviation Industry
• George Barnes Brucks and the First English Survey of the Gulf
• British Government resist modernisation of the Pearling Industry

The British Library

While working on Qatar Foundation Partnership Project, I was asked to contribute an essay about maps in support of the 2016-17 exhibition Drawing the Line:

• Oil Maps of the Middle East

During my time at the British Library I contributed numerous essays to the British Library’s blogs. My work has been published on the Library’s Untold Lives and European Studies blogs:

• An Eyewitness Account of Life in the Early 19th-Century Habsburg Empire
• Isfahan – The City of Polish Children
• The Hodeidah Incident: Britain’s indiscriminate military action in Yemen
• The British Legion’s Fundraising in the Age of Empire
• Persian carpets for European Customers
• ‘One Heap of Stones as good as another’ – Bahrain’s disappearing Burial Mounds
• ‘Pre-packed airports’ for the Persian Gulf?
• Mud hovels, mean Houses and Natural Philosophy
• The lonely Death of a British Vice-Consul in Persia
• The Chinese Labour Corps in Basra
• ‘A Smack at the Chikor’
• Beards, Barley and Bear-Baiting: Revenue Collection in Shiraz
• How an Indian performance Troupe found itself destitute in Victorian London
• The Euphrates Expedition of 1836: Ingenuity and Tragedy in Mesopotamia
• A Polymath in Muscat
• Somewhere between Freedom and Slavery: Runaway Slaves in Britain’s Indian Navy
• Piracy and Plunder off the Oman Coast

Msheireb Museums, Qatar (2011-12)

Msheireb Museums consist of four museums in the Msheireb district of Doha, Qatar. While working at heritage consultancy Barker Langham, I worked on the content development, narratives and scripts for each museum.

The largest of the four museums, Bin Jelmood House, focuses on historic and modern-day slavery in Qatar, Arabia, and the wider Indian Ocean World. Given the complex and emotive nature of the subject, the museum’s content and narratives were developed with the guidance of a widely recruited panel of experts and academics. The result is a museum that has been praised for its honest examination of the region’s slave trade.

Press coverage:

• The Economist, 11 May 2017
• The National (UAE), 23 May 2016
• The Telegraph, 11 November 2015
• Reuters, 10 November 2015

National Museum of Qatar (2011-12)

Another project I was involved in at Barker Langham was the National Museum of Qatar, which opened in 2019. In 2011/12 we worked on early stages of content development for the museum’s various galleries. My responsibilities included recruiting researchers for the project, and coordinating the collection of research and content materials on Barker Langham’s own content management system.

Graduation from the University of Glasgow (2010)

My thesis is available to view online at:

Further papers and texts based on the contents of my PhD can be found in the following places:

• ‘Farmers on notice’: the threat faced by Weimar Berlin’s garden colonies in the face of the city’s Neues Bauen housing programme Urban History Journal, May 2012
• The Paintings of Gustav Wunderwald Public Domain Review, June 2017.
• My own blog, In the Jungle of Cities, which contains many Berlin-focused essays.

Royal Academy of Music Museum (2010-11)

In role as Digitisation Coordinator at the Royal Academy of Music’s Museum and Library, I oversaw the digitisation and photography of a varied mix of collection, including manuscripts and musical scores, musical instruments, printed ephemera, and paintings. Much of my time was spent on a HLF-funded project to digitise Sir Henry Wood’s musical scores, and deliver a Key Stage 2 online learning resource about Wood’s life and work.

Overseas Research Scholarship (2008-09)

In 2008 I received a one-year scholarship from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst, that enabled me to spend a year in Berlin, in order to undertake research for my PhD thesis.

University of Glasgow (2006-08)

I worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of History of Art and the University of Glasgow. During my time in Glasgow I also contributed to a project to digitise the Department’s collection of 35mm slides.

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