Richard Ovenden has been Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of University Libraries since 2014, and Head of Gardens, Libraries and Museums, since 2022. He holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2019.
Richard serves as President of the Digital Preservation Coalition, and holds Fellowships of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has been elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the British Academy, and to both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Durham University in 2024 and received the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2025. He serves on the Advisory Boards of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbezitz in Berlin, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is a member of the Faculty at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He writes extensively on libraries, archives and information management, on the history of the book and the history of photography: Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack (2020) was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2021. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, The Observer, The Atlantic, and Prospect.
