Richard Ovenden

Richard Ovenden has been the senior Executive position of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, since 2014. Prior to that Richard held positions at Durham University Library, the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh. He moved to the Bodleian Libraries in 2003 as Keeper of Special Collections, becoming Deputy Librarian in 2011.

Richard serves as Treasurer of the Consortium of European Research Libraries, as President of the Digital Preservation Coalition, and as a member of the Board of the Council on Library and Information Resources (in Washington DC). He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach). He is also a member of the Libraries Committee of the International Alliance of Research Universities and the Information and Open Access Policy Group of the League of European Research Universities. He is Chair of the Legal Deposit Libraries Implementation Group and a member of the Legal Deposit Libraries Committee, the Agency for Legal Deposit Libraries and the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit.

Ovenden has written extensively on professional concerns of library and information management, on the history of photography, and has written a history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attacks.

He was educated at the University of Durham and University College London, and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.