Richard Gartner is a librarian and academic who has specialised in the field of metadata and digital libraries for over twenty years. He is currently the Digital Librarian at the Warburg Institute in London. Previously, he was for sixteen years the New Media Librarian for the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where he was responsible for the introduction of the Internet into the Library, its first CD-ROM network and its first digital imaging projects. More recently he was a lecturer at King’s College London where he taught and researched metadata and digital curation. Throughout his career, his research has concentrated on metadata, a subject in which he has published widely. He is on the editorial board for METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), a widely-used metadata standard in digital libraries. He has also maintained a long-term interest in international librarianship, which has taken him in the past to China, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Armenia amongst other countries.