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Alison Wilson

Tel Number: 01223 762297
Fax Number: 01223 763110

E-mail: amw18@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk

Murray Edwards College
Cambridge
CB3 0DF

Alison Wilson is an English graduate with research experience and professional qualifications in information science. She graduated in English at Bristol University and received a Cambridge MLitt. for a dissertation on animal symbolism in medieval literature and art. As a mature student she updated her library qualification by studying for an MSc. in Information Science at University College London.

Alison was Librarian of Murray Edwards College from 1994 to 2010 and has been a Fellow since 1996. She introduced a programme of automation, with the result that all 60,000 books are now catalogued on computer, allowing quick self-service borrowing. Alison designed and managed the conversion of the semi-basement of the Library to provide extra seating, shelving, office space and stacks and a comfortable browsing area, and devised the IT Resource Centre, opened in October 2001. Her role expanded to include managing the College Archives and she was responsible for producing the archival film celebrating the College's 50th Anniversary.

Alison's career began in the Rare Books department of the University Library and in the eighties she was Assistant Librarian in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College. This led to research into sixteenth century books and bindings. She maintains an interest in rare books as Committee member of the Historic Libraries Forum and is an enthusiast for information technology. She has long-standing connections with Germany and has written and lectured about the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Halle-Wittenberg. In Summer 2003 and again in 2007 she visited new German academic libraries to study their design and architecture.  Two of her articles on this subject were published in CILIP Update.

September 2004 Germany - leading library design

January/February 2008 Re-thinking Berlin's academic libraries.

After a lecture on Recent developments in Cambridge college libraries at the LIBER Architectural Group conference in Utrecht, Alison was commissioned to compile the book "Furtherance of academic excellence: documentation of new library buildings in Cambridge", published in 2006 in the series Goettinger Bibliotheksschriften (37).

Alison is a member of the committee of the German Studies Library Group. She also offers consultancy in the field of library design.