Simon Tanner

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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^[1] at King's College London^[2]. He is a part of the Centre for the Computing in the Humanities^[3] management team and a Business Fellow.

He is co-author (with Marilyn Deegan) of "Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age"^[4] 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^[5] and a member of the Digitisation Advisory Group^[6] to JISC. He is also the Program Chair for the Imaging Science and Technology Archiving Conference^[7].

He has a Library and Information Science background. He is leading the King's team working on digitising the Dead Sea Scrolls^[8]] and is co-Director for the Desmond Tutu Digital Archive^[9].

[edit] Tanner's Ideas

Defining Museum Priorities for Digital Images^[10]
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^[11] ^[12]^[13].