Past, Present and Future - Professor Elizabeth Shepherd (UCL DIS)

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Elizabeth Shepherd Past, Present and Future: the Archive, the Academy and the Community This lecture tells the story of archives and archivists in 20th century England by examining the contributions of some characterful pioneers in the archives. Since 1947, archivists have been represented in the academy, initially through professional graduate education, but more recently in an emerging academic discipline with an international research profile. Archivists have now broken out of the individual scholarly and historical archive into a broad professional domain of information and records management. The lecture will look at how, in future, archivists and academics best develop their distinctive contribution to society and the community, facilitating transparency and preserving memory. Professor Elizabeth Shepherd joined UCL from professional practice as an archivist twenty one years ago, when the Department of Information Studies at UCL was called SLAIS and hidden away in the Henry Morley Building. She began teaching records management and historical sources to 12 students on the MA in Archive Studies: now she teaches concepts and contexts and management to 45 students on the MA in Archives and Records Management. In 1992 she wrote about electronic records. Now her research interests lie in the relationship between freedom of information, open government data and records management, and in the history of the archive profession in England, as explored in Archives and Archivists in 20th Century England (Ashgate, 2009).