![[University crest]](logo.gif){kind=logo}
Oxford Digital Library,
Department of Special Collections,
Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford,
Osney One Building, Osney Mead, Oxford OX2 0EW, United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)1865 2-80032, F: +44 (0)1865 2-04937, E: <alexander.huber@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
![[Alexander Huber, 2007]](ah.jpg)
Welcome to my home page at the University of Oxford! I have been at Oxford University since 2002 and I work in the Oxford Digital Library (ODL), a unit of the Department of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. My academic background is in the humanities, I hold an MA in English from the University of Munich (LMU München), specializing in the literature of the eighteenth century.
My main role within the Oxford Digital Library is the co-ordination of its metadata services. I maintain the ODL's METS-based framework and am responsible for quality assurance of the digital resources (digital images, electronic text, finding aids etc.) produced in the ODL and to this end consult with academics, librarians, and researchers involved in the creation or migration of metadata to advise, analyse requirements, train, and monitor the process. I have been managing ODL projects mainly in humanities subject areas, e.g. medieval Western MSS and eighteenth-century political cartoons. I am also responsible for the European mirror of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) Text Creation Partnership (TCP) projects (subscription required), part of which are located here in Oxford. I am currently involved in a variety of ongoing projects and am also looking into integrating Oxford's legacy digital projects into the ODL. My main areas of interest are: virtual and digital library initiatives, especially within the humanities; virtual research environments; humanities computing and the development of digital resources; metadata frameworks for encoding digital objects; digitization of primary sources and secondary materials; textual editing and TEI-based scholarly editions. I have written a number of reports on conferences I attended over the years:
![[News]](feed-icon.png){kind=icon}
I am also the co-founder (with Reimer Eck, formerly Associate Director of the Göttingen State and University Library [SUB Göttingen]) and editor of The Thomas Gray Archive, a long-term, unfunded research project devoted to the mid-eighteenth-century poet and letter-writer Thomas Gray (1716-1771). The Archive offers access to Gray's complete poetry, extensive collaborative commentary, selected prose works, a concordance to Gray's poetry, a digital library of primary sources and audio-visual materials, and a finding aid to Thomas Gray manuscripts. There is also an increasing number of secondary resources available, including a biography, chronology, bibliography, glossary, and picture gallery. Originally hosted only on a server in the US, the Archive now also has a UK server hosted by the University of Oxford. I am currently investigating the feasibility of digitizing Thomas Gray manuscripts held in libraries and archives around the world and making them available online. I authored the original articles on Thomas Gray (in English and German) on Wikipedia and actively develop the website of the Archive, which has been freely accessible online since November 2000.
Before coming to Oxford in 2002, I was working at the SUB Göttingen, where I was managing the interdisciplinary Virtual Library of Anglo-American Culture (VLib-AAC) project. The VLib-AAC is an integrated online library, focusing on English studies and Anglo-American history, which provides seamless, subject-specific access to the SUB's catalogues and databases as well as to its printed and electronic resources. Services include cross-searching hybrid library materials as well as online document delivery of traditional library media and direct access to electronic documents and online databases. The VLib-AAC was developed with support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG [German Research Council]) as part of a program for Virtual Subject Libraries in Germany.
While at Göttingen, I also developed Anglistik Guide (the German equivalent of Intute : Arts and Humanities : English Studies), a subject gateway to scholarly relevant internet resources on Anglo-American languages and literatures. Online resources are described and evaluated with a set of Dublin Core metadata, new records are continuously added to the database, already catalogued ones regularly double-checked and updated. More information about the projects I oversaw while at Göttingen is available in my article entitled "From Special Subject Collections to Discipline-based Virtual Libraries: the Virtual Library of Anglo-American Culture at the Goettingen State and University Library", which appeared in Global Issues in 21st Century Research Librarianship, ed. by Sigrún Klara Hannesdóttir. NORDINFO 25th Anniversary Publication. NORDINFO Publication, 48. Helsinki: NORDINFO, 2002, pp. 316-343.
Before coming to Göttingen, I studied English, German, and theatre studies at the University of Munich, where I received an MA specializing in the English literature of the eighteenth century. My dissertation (in German) was entitled Paratexte in der englischen Erzählprosa des 18. Jahrhunderts (1997 [Paratexts in eighteenth-century English prose fiction]) and is available online [PDF, 1.5M]. Some of my student papers (in German) have been published at Hausarbeiten.de.
Alexander Huber.