Event date: Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The Penn Libraries announced the appointment of Dr. William Noel to Director of the Special Collections Center and Founding Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, effective September 4. A distinguished art historian, Dr. Noel has groundbreaking experience in the application of digital technologies to manuscript studies. In addition to a long record of publication, he is especially well known for directing an international program at the Walters Art Gallery to conserve, image and study the Archimedes Palimpsest, the unique source for three treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician (archimedespalimpsest.org). In recent years, Dr. Noel has attracted substantial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to build an extraordinary open access library of digitized manuscripts. That collection, known today as the Digital Walters, presents full digital surrogates and catalogs of illuminated medieval manuscripts. This archive of high quality images and descriptive metadata is shared freely worldwide under a Creative Commons License and provides a model for the burgeoning digital archive of primary sources emerging on the Web.

And here are links to a TED talk he gave recently, and to a TED blog.

ted.com/talks/william_noel_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archimedes.html

blog.ted.com/2012/05/29/the-wide-open-future-of-the-art-museum-qa-with-william-noel/