Simon Tanner

Simon Tanner is a leading thinker, academic and consultant in how the digital domain relates to library, museum and archiving digital strategies.

Tanner is Director of King's Digital Consultancy Services [KDCS: http://www.digitalconsultancy.net/] at King's College London [King's College London http://www.kcl.ac.uk/] . He is a part of the Centre for the Computing in the Humanities [Centre for the Computing in the Humanities http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch] management team and a Business Fellow.

He is co-author (with Marilyn Deegan) of "Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age" [ Book Review by Stephen Paul Davis, Columbia University [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/04bookreview.html Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age] ] and co-editor (with Marilyn Deegan) of "Digital Preservation", a collection of essays, both published by Facet.

Tanner is Chair of the Web Archiving sub-committee for the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel to DCMS [Legal Deposit Advisory Panel: Half Year Report 1 September 2005 http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/2E7D0C0C-6781-467F-89A5-87CE63E88ACD/0/LDAPReportMay06.pdf] and a member of the Digitisation Advisory Group [JISC Digitisation Advisory Group http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/committees/working_groups/digitisation.aspx] to JISC. He is also the Program Chair for the Imaging Science and Technology Archiving Conference [IS&T Archiving http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2008/] .

He has a Library and Information Science background. He is leading the King's team working on digitising the Dead Sea Scrolls [From the Dead Sea to the digital age by Alan Cane, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/12eeda2e-b030-11dc-b874-0000779fd2ac,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F12eeda2e-b030-11dc-b874-0000779fd2ac.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.bibleplaces.com%2F2007%2F12%2Fdead-sea-scrolls-to-be-re-photographed.html&nclick_check=1] ] and is co-Director for the Desmond Tutu Digital Archive [Desmond Tutu Digital Archive http://www.tutuarchive.org/] .

Tanner has led the pilot digital imaging project of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israeli Antiquities Authority in August 2008 [ Israel to Display the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet - New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/world/middleeast/27scrolls.html] [CNN Video - The scrolls go digital http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/tech/2008/08/27/wedeman.digital.dead.sea.scroll.cnn.html] . Rory McCarthy at the Guardian wrote about this activity: "Already the work has brought to light new revelations about the scrolls. The new infra-red photography has picked out letters that had not previously been visible to the naked eye. "The ink stays dark and the leather becomes light and suddenly you can see text that you may no have been able to see," said Tanner. "We have revealed some text that has not been previously seen by scholars." The detailed colour photographs of papyrus fragments may help to identify pieces that fit together and to identify fragments written by the same scribes. Scholars hope this new information might enable them to piece together more of the fragments and so come closer to putting complete sections of the scrolls together" [From papyrus to cyberspace: Israel to make Dead Sea Scrolls available online - Guardian Newspaper http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/27/israel] .

Tanner's Ideas

Defining Museum Priorities for Digital Images [A Mellon Foundation funded study:Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in American art museums http://kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/USart/index.html]
Museums have many perceived barriers of revenue, licensing and control. Control is the most important factor: crediting and promoting the host museum and honouring the artist and their work are the non-negotiable and noble goals of art museums.

To ensure a whole museum has a clear understanding of the purpose of the imaging and rights services and the way they link to the museums mission then a review of priorities is recommended by Tanner.

• Is control over the way an image of an artwork owned by the museum used, represented and credited the most important priority to the museum?
• Is the fidelity of the image to the original artwork as important a priority as controlling its use?
• Is promotion of the museums collections as important a priority?
• Does scholarly and educational use of an artwork (especially one in the public domain) ever contradict or supersede the need to control its representation and use?
• Does serving the internal needs of the museum ever contradict or supersede the need to control the representation of artworks?
• Does recouping service costs or making a surplus ever contradict or supersede the need for control? Is there a sum of money at which the museum would relax such control?
• Are providing high fidelity images with an appropriate license for the museum and the wider communities use more important than how much the service costs to run?

These ideas and the research supporting them have shaped the debate and provided the only detailed evidence base for museum activity in this area. They have particularly influenced the work of Ken Hamma at the Getty Museum and also the UK Museums Copyright Group [MCG: http://www.museumscopyright.org.uk/index.htm] [Debated in: Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility by Kenneth Hamma (Exec. Dir. for Digital Policy, J. Paul Getty Trust) http://dlib.anu.edu.au/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html] [Previous work referenced and debated in Responses to Copyright, Access, and Cost Challenges by Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann http://cnx.org/content/m13952/latest/] .

References