The Royal Irish Academy is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Natalie Harrower
PRESS RELEASE
25th May 2015
New Director Appointed at the Digital Repository of Ireland
The Royal Irish Academy is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Natalie Harrower as Acting Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI). Dr. Harrower is currently DRI’s Deputy Director, and was originally appointed in 2012 as Manager of Education and Outreach. She will take up the position on 1 July 2015, following the departure of founding Director, Dr. Sandra Collins, who has been appointed as Director of the National Library of Ireland.
Announcing the appointment, Laura Mahoney, Executive Secretary of the RIA, said: “I am very pleased to welcome Dr. Harrower into her new role at the Digital Repository of Ireland, and look forward to the continued success of the DRI, which has been central to developing the infrastructure and community for digital preservation in Ireland and more broadly in Europe. Dr. Harrower has played a pivotal role at DRI, and is ideally positioned to ensure its future achievements.
“We wish Dr. Sandra Collins success in her new role as Director of the National Library of Ireland, and thank her for the exceptional leadership and commitment she has displayed in building the DRI from its inception, and achieving international recognition in a short period of time. We look forward to continued collaborations with both the NLI and Dr. Collins.”
—ENDS—
Contact:
Dr. Frances Narkiewicz, Programme Manager, DRI
f.narkiewicz@ria.ie
+353 (0)1 6090674
Biography of Dr. Natalie Harrower
At the DRI, Dr. Harrower has been responsible for initiating and delivering a broad education and training programme in digital preservation and related areas – including digital humanities, digital archiving, digital curation, and linked data – and for building DRI’s community profile and partnerships. She has been instrumental in securing grants for DRI from European funders (FP7, H2020), and Irish funders (SFI, Enterprise Ireland), and leads a number of leveraged projects for DRI, including the Social Repository of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy’s contributions to the collaborative DAH PhD programme. Dr. Harrower is the Creative Lead of the multiple-award-winning project Inspiring Ireland, and has served on conference and academic workshop organising committees for the Research Data Alliance, Open Repositories, the European Data Forum, Discover Research Dublin, The Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HICSS, and the ALLEA E-Humanities working group. Dr. Harrower established the international conference series DPASSH: Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, and is chairing its inaugural conference in June 2015.
Prior to her appointment at the DRI, Dr. Harrower was a theatre and film scholar, specialising in Irish identity, politics, and historiography, as seen through the critical lens of contemporary Irish theatre and film. Before moving to Ireland to take up an appointment at Trinity College Dublin on an IRCHSS-funded Irish theatre research project, she was an Assistant Professor of Drama at Queen’s University (Canada). Prior to her appointment at Queen’s, she was a lecturer in theatre, film, and Celtic Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Harrower received her PhD in Drama from the University of Toronto and her MA in Political Science from York University.
About the DRI
The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is a national trusted digital repository for social and cultural content held by Irish institutions, funded by the HEA PRTLI Cycle 5. The Royal Irish Academy is the lead partner in the DRI consortium, which includes Maynooth University, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin Institute of Technology, National University of Ireland, Galway, and National College of Art and Design. As a national digital infrastructure, the DRI is working with a wide range of institutional stakeholders to link together and preserve Ireland’s rich and varied humanities and social science data through a broad portfolio of leveraged projects. The DRI also acts as a focal point for digital best practices and policy, promoting the benefits of digital preservation and open access to data, while respecting rights and data protection. DRI has built its repository on open-source platforms, and seeks to share best practices with the community to enable cost savings and improved standards of preservation and access. http://www.dri.ie
