My name is Callum. I’m a trained librarian with interests in digital librarianship, widening access to physical material through digital means, and creating engaging content from digitised material.

After seven years creating and managing web content for an online retailer, I was ready for a career change which would help build on the elements of that work I enjoyed most, namely the creation, curatorship of and management of information in textual and visual form.

Thus, in 2021 I embarked on a full-time master’s degree in Information and Library Studies at Aberystwyth University, from which I graduated with distinction the following year. In this field I have a particular interest in classificatory practices and rituals within online communities. This is reflected in my dissertation topic, which focused on the continuing relevance of genre as a means of classifying popular music in the context of a rise in the popularity of playlist-based classification on digital streaming platforms.

My undergraduate degree was in Modern History and International Relations, which I studied at the University of Reading and from which I graduated in 2011.

Presently, I work as Digitization Assistant at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford and am primarily responsible for ingesting content into the Bodleian’s Digital Bodleian platform. You can read more about my role here.

In my free time I enjoy cycling, hiking, birdwatching, listening to music of a variety of genres (with soft spots for jazz fusion, trance, prog rock, techno, hardstyle, smooth jazz, ambient, and lounge music), occasional video gaming, and even more occasional board gaming.

I volunteer for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, helping to transcribe letters relating to geologist William Buckland (1784–1856) and entomologist James Charles Dale (1791–1872) from the museum’s archive. I also have a keen interest in local history, focusing specifically on the village of Wittering in Cambridgeshire, where I spent most of my time growing up. I have a (largely dormant) blog dedicated to my research here.