The web is a fundamental part of our daily lives - but the digital world so many of us depend on is much more fragile than it seems.
Join us for this special Bodleian Libraries event marking World Digital Preservation Day, to learn more about some of the current risks to our digital heritage and what is being done to try to preserve our collective cultural memory.
Chair
Professor David De Roure is Professor of e-Research at Oxford and a long-standing leader in Digital Scholarship. An early pioneer of Hypertext and Web research, his work on knowledge infrastructure has long been concerned with how digital research is shared, sustained and preserved, and how it intersects with AI.
Speakers
Dr Andrea Kocsis is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Humanities Informatics, specialising in digital cultural heritage. Her recent research explores how web archives can be made more accessible, usable, and engaging through user-centred design and creative practice and how they can be repositories of collective memory. To explore this topic, she has held the National Librarian’s Research Fellowship in Digital Scholarship at the National Library of Scotland (2024–25) and the Archives of Tomorrow Methods Fellowship at Cambridge University Library/Cambridge Digital Humanities (2022–23), and is the lead investigator on the BA/Leverhulme Small Grant project Digital Ghosts – Exploring Scotland’s Heritage on the Web (2025–26).
Andrea Mills is Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada.
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is the Chair of AI@Oxford Research and Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is also Senior Distinguished Scientist at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford. He served as Principal of Jesus College, Oxford from 2015 – 2026.
He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, led the development of the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website. In 2010, he joined the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board – overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. He continues to advise Government in a number of roles and in 2025 he was appointed to the Council for Science and Technology, which advises the Prime Minister and the Cabinet on strategic science and technology policy issues that cut across the responsibilities of individual government departments.
Nigel was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.
