CEO

EXPERIENCED

He draws on over three decades of experience in academic research in AI, corporate technology development, IT management, and innovation in cultural heritage. He has created, led, and delivered large projects and programmes. Complementing this is experience establishing successful not-for-profit oranisations and service on company and project boards.

LEADERSHIP

• Established and led the British Library departments for for Digital Preservation, Research Data, and Digital Scholarship
• Founder and first president of DataCite, an international not-for-profit organisation dedicated to connecting articles and research data.
• Founder of OPF, the Open Preservation Foundation, an international not-for-profit organisation that advances shared standards and solutions for the long-term preservation of digital content.
• Founding signatory of the IIIF-C, the international consortium that brings together organisations that need to provide rich access to digitised image, audio, and video resources through community-driven APIs.

STANDARDS

Dr Farquhar has served on several key standards committees.

• PREMIS Editorial Committee member. PREMIS is the international standard for metadata to support the preservation of digital objects and ensure their long-term usability.
• METS Editorial Committee member. METS is is a standard test for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using XML.
• Office Open XML Standards Committee member. Office Open XML is the file format specification that underlies the Microsoft Office suite. Ecma International standardized the initial version as ECMA-376. ISO and IEC standardized later versions as ISO/IEC 29500. Dr Farquhar co-chaired the ECMA committee together with Jean Paoli.

PROJECTS AND PROGRAMMES

Dr Farquhar has led and directed several major projects and programmes including:

• PLANETS Coordinator and Scientific Director. This project developed processes and technology for Digital Preservation and received the Digital Preservation Coalition’s award for Research & Development. It was followed by the SCAPE project, led by Ross King.
• THOR Coordinator. This project developed a global infrastructure global infrastructure that uniquely identifies and attributes scientific contributions. It was followed by the Freya project, led by Simon Lambert.
• Endangered Archives Programme Director. This on-going programme, funded by Arcadia, facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration.
• British Library Labs Programme Director. This on-going programme was originally supported by the Mellon Foundation. It brought together a vibrant community of researchers, data scientists, artists, and digital practitioners interested in computational research using digital collections. It also gave them access to tools, data, and support.
• Living with Machines co-Investigator and Advisory Board member. This was a major digital humanities project funded by the UKRI. It brought together historians, data scientists, computational linguists, geographers and archivists to better understand the social and cultural impact of the mechanisation of work during the nineteenth century (commonly called the Industrial Revolution).

OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTIONS

• Fido file format identification tool creator
• IceVision machine learning framework for object identification

HISTORY

Digital Lifecycle Management Ltd had a precursor in Digital Lifecycle Management LLP – a partnership between Dr Farquhar and Dr Angela Dappert. In honor of her contributions to the field of digital preservation, we sponsor the Angela Dappert Memorial Award for Digital Preservation.

Correspondence

©2024 Digital Lifecycle Management Ltd, Bridge House, 25 Fiddlebridge Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England, AL10 0SP, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales No. 15444533.