Biography

Dr. Christine Madsen works at the intersection of libraries and technology and the people who manage them. She is expert in building large-scale systems, teams, and organizations that use technology to connect researchers, teachers, and students with digital research data. She is interested in understanding and building knowledge-oriented organizations of the future–occasionally taking inspiration from those of the past. 

Before co-founding A21 with Megan, Christine led the Open Collections Program (OCP) at Harvard University Library, where she created cross-departmental, collaborative workflows and subsequently scaled OCP from a project to a department. She later became the Head of Digital Programmes at the Bodleian Libraries, where she was the visionary behind the digital.bodleian project, a completely new, sustainable and scalable architecture for delivering collections online.

During her time in Oxford, Christine worked with diverse stakeholders across the many libraries at Oxford, and with the faculties, divisions, and museums to strategize and build coherent solutions for the evolving needs of the university. In addition to leading the development of the Strategic Plan for the Bodleian Libraries, she helped to write and implement a Digital Humanities Strategy for the university and a vision for unified, sustainable ‘Digital Oxford’ which will provide seamless digital research support across all faculties and collections. She also earned her DPhil from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), where she performed one of the first large-scale ethnographic studies of an entire discipline in order to understand its relationship to digital technology and the library.