Christine Madsen

DPhil Alumnus

Christine Madsen

Christine Madsen is a librarian and academic whose research aims to re-centre libraries at the heart of all the disciplines, and re-focus the work of librarians on creating a space for the transformation of information into knowledge.

Profile

Christine Madsen is a librarian and academic whose research aims to re-centre libraries at the heart of all the disciplines, and re-focus the work of librarians on creating a space for the transformation of information into knowledge. Her current and recent projects include a survey of humanities scholars' use of online research and collaboration tools; a webmetric analysis of library digitization web sites; a collaborative project to study archived web sites in the humanities; and a theoretical grounding of the study of Internet in philosophy, society and religion. Her dissertation project is a critical analysis of the impact of digitization on scholarship and practice in the Tibetan and Himalayan region, but her larger research agenda is to recapture an integrated space in and from which to study the future of libraries.

After completing her first degree in the visual arts, Christine began her career in libraries as manager of analogue and digital image production in the Art and Architecture Library at UC San Diego. While at UCSD, she went on gain her MLIS and served as a technical consultant on several large-scale digitization and metadata mapping projects, including ArtSTOR. In 2003 she joined the Harvard University Library as the manager of the Open Collections Program where she gained expertise in the development of efficient, replicable methods for the creation of comprehensive, subject-based digital resources.

Positions held at the OII

  • DPhil Alumnus, March 2011 -
  • DPhil student, October 2007 - February 2011

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Research

Past projects

  • Researcher Engagement with Web Archives

    April - August 2010

    This project explores how to bridge the gap between archivists and researchers, and how preserved web content archives might be used by researchers and others to ask meaningful new questions.

  • Humanities Information Practices

    February - November 2010

    Many humanities scholars are enthusiastic users of digital resources, however there is a potential mismatch between what (and how) resources are offered, and how scholars might use them. How should they be designed to ensure maximum use by scholars?

  • Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study

    June 2008 - April 2009

    This project combined quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources and to develop a best practices toolkit that allows assessment of the impact of digitisation projects by researchers and funding bodies.

  • World Wide Web of Humanities

    April 2008 - March 2009

    Establishing a framework for e-Humanities research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections.

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Publications

Articles

Chapters

Conference papers

Presentations

  • Meyer, E. and Madsen, C. (2009) TIDSR Survey Data. Presented at 'Humanities on the Web: Is it working?', Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 19 March 2009.
  • Madsen, C. and Meyer, E. (2009) Selecting and Analysing the WWI and WWII Collections. Presented at 'Humanities on the Web: Is it working?', Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 19 March 2009.

Reports

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Webcasts

  • The World Wide Web of Humanities: Project Workshop

    The World Wide Web of Humanities: Project Workshop

    Recorded on: 19 March 2009 Duration: 00:52:00

    Results of a project that aims to establish a framework for e-Humanities research using open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections.

  • Toolkits for e-Humanities: Project Workshop

    Toolkits for e-Humanities: Project Workshop

    Recorded on: 19 March 2009 Duration: 01:11:16

    Presenting the results of the Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study project, which combines quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources.

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News

  • Madsen receives 2010 ACRL Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship award

    2 February 2010 American Library Association

    Christine Madsen, librarian and OII DPhil candidate, is awarded the 2010 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her proposal 'Library Futures: Building a New Knowledge Architecture in Academic Libraries.'

  • Bodleian Library announces the first Balliol-Bodley Scholarship

    11 February 2009 Oxford University Library Services

    The Bodleian Library together with Balliol College establishes a new joint scholarship for graduate students. The first scholar to be awarded the scholarship is OII DPhil student Christine Madsen

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Blog

  • The Economics of Access

    Christine Madsen on 23 Jul 2011 17:02PM

    The arrest of Aaron Schwarz recently for downloading 4.5 million articles from JSTOR has revived discussions about whether online full text subscription databases like JSTOR ‘should’ be acting as gatekeepers to our cultural heritage. Most of [...]

  • Librarians and Serendipity

    Christine Madsen on 24 May 2011 10:46AM

    A couple of interesting ideas have converged this week and I think they are worth looking at together. First Seth Godin set of a firestorm amongst librarians, when he wrote about the future of libraries (and librarianship): We need librarians … [...]

  • Activating Prayers

    Christine Madsen on 1 Mar 2011 10:13AM

    I am very pleased to have an article in the most recent issue of Glimpse Journal, all about text. The article was informed by my recent research on the use of digitization in the Tibetan diaspora. I had been studying … Continue reading →

  • Changing Education Paradigms and Libraries

    Christine Madsen on 22 Jan 2011 17:40PM

    I really enjoy the RSA Animates series. This one from Sir Ken Robinson about changing education paradigms is particularly relevant to libraries. He speaks in part about divergent or lateral thinking, and of a study that showed that divergent thinking [...]

  • “We had this crisis. We told you about it. You didn’t listen.”

    Christine Madsen on 2 Oct 2010 18:06PM

    Barbara Fister of the ‘Library Babel Fish’ blog recently posted a rather scathing response to an article in The Scientist about the danger of journal cancellations by academic libraries. Worried that the cancellation of journals due to library [...]

  • Will libraries survive or thrive?

    Christine Madsen on 13 Aug 2010 11:51AM

    Dan Greenstein did a particularly nice job at the recent ‘Survive or Thrive’ conference of explaining the current relationship between academic libraries and their parent organizations (universities) and the impact of the current fiscal crisis [...]

  • 10 principles for good technology

    Christine Madsen on 26 May 2010 16:28PM

    In the 1980′s, Deiter Rams wrote the “ten principles for good design” (sometimes referred to as the “ten commandments of good design”). The principles came from a time of self-reflection when he and others in the design world [...]

  • When one door closes…

    Christine Madsen on 21 Mar 2010 08:35AM

    Last week as the New York Public Library opened a new branch in Battery Park, Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer said, Any day we open a library is a good day. Meanwhile, Boston announced the closure of perhaps as many … Continue reading →

  • On Browsing

    Christine Madsen on 17 Mar 2010 12:52PM

    The University of Michigan recently announced that it was finally getting rid of its card catalogue. This elicited many a  response from librarians on some of the listservs I monitor who were sad to see it go. Most of the … Continue reading →

  • A Matter of Audience

    Christine Madsen on 10 Mar 2010 17:05PM

    I just came from a meeting with the creators of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag. They were very interested in how the question of intended audience changes the kind of digital project you create. I shared my experiences with … Continue reading [...]

  • Library, Archive, and Museum Convergence

    Christine Madsen on 10 Mar 2010 12:37PM

    There is a lot of discussion these days about the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums.The Center for the Future of Museums had a recent guest post on this topic, also introducing the IMLS-funded wiki on the same theme. The … Continue [...]

  • Books are going, but are libraries still places to read?

    Christine Madsen on 16 Feb 2010 13:50PM

    After a piece in the New York Times about a school library trading in its books for a “digital center,” they gathered up some of the responses from students. Some were (for me anyway) quite heartening. I was happy to … Continue reading [...]

  • Latest on the Google Book Search Settlement

    Christine Madsen on 3 Feb 2010 10:46AM

    I was in the midst of writing this on Lessig’s recent article on the Google Book Search Settlement when I received the latest “Wired Campus” email from the Chronicle. Oh, the irony. The top 2 news stories were about Stanford … [...]

  • Paradox of the Week? Planning for Informal Learning

    Christine Madsen on 26 Jan 2010 14:25PM

    Discussions about ‘informal learning’ seem to be growing. I am interested because libraries and museums have always been really important spaces for informal and unstructured learning. I think it is important to study and understand how it [...]

  • Librarians of the Future?

    Christine Madsen on 18 Jan 2010 19:40PM

    Seth Godin’s short post on the library of the future got a lot of librarians stirred up, which is how I found out about it. He criticizes the current model of libraries as “community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t [...]

  • Can ‘accessibility’ go too far?

    Christine Madsen on 14 Jan 2010 21:53PM

    The New York Public Library recently redesigned their logo. In their words, this was in an attempt to make a “new logo that is user-friendly, accessible, dynamic and relevant.” The Library of Congress recently did the same. In both of these [...]

  • Google Book Search Settlement Withdrawn

    Christine Madsen on 1 Oct 2009 15:38PM

    Last week the Google Book Search settlement was officially withdrawn from the US court where it was being decided, “in light of the parties’ plans to modify the Settlement Agreement”. With over 400 filings in response to the settlement [...]

  • When is a library not a library?

    Christine Madsen on 6 Aug 2009 10:10AM

    A few months ago Mick Jones (of the Clash) opened up the ‘Rock and Roll Public Library.’ (It has since moved from the gallery space in Chelsea to a new space.)  I heard about this from a friend’s (also a librarian) facebook feed. Several of the comments [...]

  • $675,000 fine for downloading 30 songs

    Christine Madsen on 1 Aug 2009 19:14PM

    Yep, that’s $22,500 for each of the 30 songs that Mr. Joel Tenenbaum admitted to downloading and sharing. The jury was kind enough to lower the RIAA’s initial valuation of the damages down from the $150,000 to which they are entitled for [...]

  • Google Book Settlement Discussions

    Christine Madsen on 31 Jul 2009 13:23PM

    There’s been surprising little discussion of the Google Book Search settlement outside of the US but I think it is worth paying attention to. It has important implications for libraries, but also for copyright law. To catch up on the discussion, [...]

Last updated on: 24 May 2013