I am delighted to announce that a week from today Brian Liddy will be joining our team as our first Research Assistant. Many of you will be familiar with Brian already from his two decades working with the collections at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

Brian brings some unusual strengths to the project. While at NMeM he negotiated loans and image rights and helped to steer various digitisation projects. More to the point, Brian has worked closely with the Talbot collection there for many years and is one of the few people in the world who can claim to have examined all of its 6000+ images. I think that the first time I had the opportunity to work with Brian was in his first weeks at Bradford when he assisted me in putting the finishing touches on Records of the Dawn of Photography; Talbot’s Notebooks P & Q (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

More recently Brian was a critical contributor to the highly successful exhibition at the Science Museum’s Media Space in London: Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph (which is up until September and gives a rare chance to see a wide variety of Talbot originals – don’t miss it).

Brian will be playing to his strengths in organising the thousands of image files that will comprise the core of the Catalogue Raisonné. He will be editing and fact-checking the entries as they are compiled for publication. More immediately, Brian will take over writing some of our weekly blogs. He will be based within the Bodleian Libraries.

A native Glaswegian, Mr Liddy also fills in some other shortcomings in our staff. No one else can match him for beekeeping experience, allotment skills, and a resonant voice in a men’s choir.

Welcome aboard, Brian!

Larry J Schaaf

Questions or Comments? Please contact digitalsupport@bodleian.ox.ac.uk