Jane Winters, professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, has been appointed to the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Committee. She joins a team of expert librarians, archivists and academics who assess applications to join the UK Memory of the World Register and the International Memory of the World Register, online catalogues that highlight culturally significant archives.

Do audio guides help or distract the visitor from enjoying the artefacts in an exhibition? New research from the School of Advanced Study (SAS), University of London, suggests that the debate misses a crucial component: how well do individual audio-tracks match the paintings.

The Institute of Historical Research (IHR) at the School of Advanced Study has published a remarkable new biographical work, charting the lives of more than 4,000 officers who fought for Parliament during the first English Civil War of 1642-46. Entitled, Cromwell Association Directory of Parliamentarian Army Officers , it is a work of extensive scholarship which promises to transform historians’ understanding of those who took up arms against Charles I.

The excitement of instant information from the internet for archivists and historians has been tempered by concerns about the shelf life of data — the so-called ‘black hole’ of lost material — and the rise of a new generation of ‘born digital’ government archives. For five days (12–16 June), academics, researchers, archivists, curators and IT developers from across the world will converge on London to address these issues at a Web Archiving Week event hosted by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and the British Library.