PhD (RMIT); MA (ANU); BA (ANU)

Edith Cowan University, Australia

Paul Uhlmann is a Fremantle based artist whose work strives to question and translate philosophies of impermanence. He works experimentally across the mediums of painting, printmaking, drawing and artists’ books – at times employing the mechanics of simple cameras obscura. He is interested in how the materiality of the mediums employed can give rise to form and how this, in turn, informs the imagination. Paul studied art in Australia and Europe on two year-long scholarships; DAAD in Germany (1986-87) and Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship in Holland (1994-95). In 2012 he was awarded a practice-led research PhD at RMIT.

He has lectured for over twenty years at various institutions including Australian National University, Monash University and Edith Cowan University. He is coordinator of the Visual Arts Course and co-founder of fold (Artists Books + Print Editions), a small press of experimental printmaking, at Edith Cowan University. He foundered his own imprint, trembling hands, for making his unique and limited-edition books in 1986. He has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1983 and his work is held in many prominent collections. He has published papers on the creative process and embodiment and articles in Imprint and Artlink magazine.

Artists’ Books as Material Objects of Resistance in The Digital Age

The rapid rise of the digital age in the early part of the 21^st century has brought many benefits but it has also fostered new challenges including ‘digital distraction’ which reduces efficiency, productiveness and the inherent value of attention. It has been argued that the dematerialisation of information into digital realms is also changing the way we think, remember and act in the world. This paper will form the position that select artists’ books hold special value for libraries and should be fostered within collections as objects which can; on the one hand, provide essential connections to traditional means of production familiar to Gutenberg printing methods; and on the other hand, represent material objects which contain complex embodied meanings which are invaluable to reading. I will argue that artists’ books are emerging to hold new agency as material forms which in the 21^st century act as objects of resistance to the dehumanising nature of the digital age. The artists’ books informing this paper are unique forms of literature which unify word and image through a hybrid of material means utilising ink, paper, letterpress, digital, intaglio, and relief prints. I will reference artist’s books from my own imprint of trembling hands and the imprint of fold which I co-foundered and which runs out of Edith Cowan University as well as works from other artists and in this manner, I aim to illuminate how these material objects express embodied communication and are essential to any library collection.

Vanessa Proudman

Director, SPARC Europe, The Netherlands

Vanessa has over 20 years’ international experience working with many leading university libraries worldwide. She also headed information and IT at a UN-affiliated international research institution in Vienna for 10 years.
She has also been programme and project manager to Europeana.eu
As the owner of Proud2Know, a consultancy that supports academic libraries, Vanessa also helps her clients create the skilled and innovative digital libraries of the future.

As Director to SPARC Europe, Vanessa is responsible for developing and implementing SPARC Europe’s Strategic Plan. She is working to make Open the default with Europe’s other Open Science organisations.

Open Science and its infrastructure has never been more important

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Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Indiana University Bloomington

Kevin Jaques has been an associate professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University since 2001. He has written two books, Authority, Conflict, and the Transmission of Diversity in Medieval Islamic Law (Brill, 2006) and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (773-852/1372-1449) (Oxford, 2010). Since 2007 he has been working on the recovery and analysis of the “lost” texts of Muhammad b. Ishaq (d. 151/767).  Jaques is a specialist in Islamic biographical traditions and practices, Islamic law, and Islamic theology. He is completing the first volume of a planned 17 volume digital edition of the collected works of Ibn Ishaq, which will be ready for publication in August 2020.

Reconstructing “Lost” Early Islamic Texts: the Earliest Versions of Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīrah

The paper will discuss my efforts to create a digital edition of the Sīrah of Muḥammad b. Isḥāq b. Yasār (d. 150/767 or 159/775-6), one of the first texts written in the Muslim tradition. For the past 12 years, I have been engaged in the recovery of the “lost” versions of Ibn Isḥāq’s text as wells as the many performance copies he produced as he travelled around the Muslim world between 734 and his death in 767. Thus far I have recovered over 750,000 words of text for 19 versions and more than 50 performances. The paper will focus on the current phase of the project, which is the completion of the Ibrahim b. Saʿd copy, the earliest version of the text, produced before 734. Ibrāhīm b. Sạʿd b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAwf (d. (d. 184/800) was the only person to whom Ibn Isḥāq transmitted while living in Madīnah. The copy, consisting of just over 100,000 words, was preserved in three copies that Ibn Saʿd produced for each of his son’s, Saʿd b. Ibrāhīm (201/817) and Yaʿqūb b. Ibrāhīm (d. 208/824), as well as for al-Faḍl b. Yaḥyā al-Barmakī (d. 192/808 or 193/809), copied by his scribe Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Ayyūb (d. 228/843). The paper will also describe the process of digital preparation for the text, methods that I hope to employ with its publication. This paper was written with the generous support of the University College London-Qatar in the spring, 2020.

Senior Intellectual Property Librarian Qatar National Library

With experience in scholarly publishing and a background in scientific research, he is an open access advocate and avid supporter of accessible and equitable knowledge. He has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the International Max Planck Research School of Molecular Biology in Goettingen, Germany, and an MBA from the Alliance Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester. At Qatar National Library, he is responsible for copyright policies and currently oversees the management of the Qatar National Library Open Access Fund.

OA in an oasis (revisited): The Growth of Open Access in the Arab World

OA ensures a visible and transparent return on publicly funded research, and there is an expectation that open access to research findings will have a positive effect on R&D. A discussion about the future of electronic publishing is not complete without looking into the open access (OA) publishing landscape. The presentation examines to what extent has the Arab world adopted OA compared to other regions. The presentation will first give an overview of recent global developments concerning open access publishing. By specifically looking into OA journals, OA repositories, and OA policies, the presentation will then examine opportunities and obstacles for OA publishing adoption in the Arab world (with a closer look into how this has changed over the last five years). Lastly, the presentation will give examples of OA adoption in Qatar, citing efforts by recently set up local OA publishers and efforts by the Qatar National Library Consortium.