Farewell to Ann Chapman, UKOLN Research Officer, 1987-2011

Upon her retirement at the end of March 2011, Ann Chapman's colleagues at UKOLN thanked her for many years of dedication, commitment, and excellent standards. Ann Chapman has been an integral part of UKOLN since its inception. Her career progression has closely reflected the development of UKOLN from a centre for cataloguing research to the centre of excellence in digital information management that it is today. 

UKOLN Director Liz Lyon observed: "Working with Ann has always been a pleasure! She commands huge community respect and rightly so.  We have been truly privileged to have Ann working at UKOLN for all these years and to benefit from her insight and expertise".

Ann first joined the University of Bath in 1970, as a Senior Library Assistant.  After a short break following the birth of her children, during which she undertook a number of contracts for specific work (which included cataloguing the Pitman and Bath & West Show special collections and writing her thesis for the Fellowship of the Library Association), Ann carried out a short piece of research on catalogue records for Philip Bryant, then Director of the Centre for Catalogue Research (CCR) – later the Centre for Bibliographic Management then UKOLN).  Ann's research during this period led, in 1987, to a permanent position within what is now UKOLN.

During her time at UKOLN Ann has been involved in a wide variety of activities, including organising events and managing funding.  Ann's research activities, however, have made the greatest contribution to UKOLN and to the wider HE and library communities.   Here is a selection:

• BNB Currency Survey monitored the availability and quality of records created for the British National Bibliography.
• The Full Disclosure series of projects examined the need for retrospective cataloguing / conversion of manual catalogue records to machine-readable form in the UK.
• Collection Description Focus aimed to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions, domains and sectors.
• Re-development Cornucopia (the online database of UK museums, galleries, archives and libraries collections, developed by the MLA) involved working on mappings of metadata schema, reviewing the content of the entries for museums, and considering how library entries could be contributed via the contributor interface.
• The Tap into Bath project created a demonstrator searchable database of collection-level descriptions of collections located in the City of Bath.

Ann also developed a number of studies for the JISC. Notably she produced an overview specification for shared infrastructure and a landscape study on the UK HE sector use of content, communication, and social networking services developed outside the sector by global enterprise.

Latterly Ann has been working with the MLA to support the cultural heritage sector and has organised and delivered a nation-wide series of workshops on applications of the social web for this sector.  Another lasting legacy is the Cultural Heritage Web Site and blog, which Ann developed and where recently she published her final blog post. and through which UKOLN will continue to provide access to the topic pages, to the successful series of briefing papers IntroBytes.

The quality of Ann's work has been recognised by awards from important organisations in our sector:

• In 2000 Ann received the CILIP Catalogue and Indexing Group's Allan Jeffreys Award 'for significant contribution to the understanding and development of statistical evidence within professional fields of interest'.
• In 2006 Ann received a Certificate of Acknowledgement from the JSC for Revision of AACR, citing her valued 'contribution to the GMD / SMD Working Group'.

Membership of committees

• Elected Honorary Secretary to the Cataloguing and Indexing Group of CILIP in April 2007
• Member of Bibliographic Standards Group of the Book Industry Communication (BIC) since 1995
• Chair of the CILIP/BL Committee on AACR2/RDA since June 2006

Professional awards and recognition

• MA from the University of Central England, 1999.
• Recipient of the 2000 CILIP Catalogue and Indexing Group’s Alan Jeffreys Award ‘for significant contribution to the understanding and development of statistical evidence within professional fields of interest.’
• A Certificate of Acknowledgement from the JSC for Revision of AACR for her ‘contribution to the GMD/SMD Working Group’, awarded in 2006.