Rate My Professor Simon Tanner

Simon Tanner is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, at King’s College London, holding the position of Interim Executive Dean for the faculty as of 2025. An accomplished information professional, consultant, digitisation expert, and academic, he has worked with major cultural institutions worldwide to enhance their impact, collections, and online presence. Tanner has consulted on or managed over 500 digital projects, including high-profile efforts such as the imaging of the Dead Sea Scrolls and digitisation projects in Africa, notably with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He founded the Digital Futures Academy, delivering programs in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and Ghana with participants from over 40 countries. Between 2003 and 2011, he served as an independent member of the UK Government-appointed Legal Deposit Advisory Panel and chaired its Web Archiving sub-committee, contributing to regulations enabling UK web archiving. Currently, he teaches primarily on the MA in Digital Asset and Media Management, a course he helped launch in 2010.

Tanner’s research focuses on the value and impact of digital resources, digitisation and digital cultures, economic, social, and cultural informatics, sustainability of digital collections in memory institutions, and Open Access strategies for cultural heritage. He is renowned for developing the Balanced Value Impact Model (BVIM) in 2012, a tool employed worldwide for measuring the multifaceted impacts of digital cultural resources across economic, social, enrichment, and learning dimensions. His influential publications include the book Delivering Impact with Digital Resources: Planning Strategy in the Attention Economy (Facet Publishing, 2020), the report Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model (King’s College London, 2012), and An analysis of the Arts and Humanities submitted research outputs to the REF2014 with a focus on academic books: An Academic Book of the Future Report (King’s College London, 2016). As principal investigator, he led projects such as Communities of Practice: The Academic Book of the Future (AHRC, 2014-2016), Make Do and Mend: A Publishing and Communication History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-45 (AHRC, 2014-2018), and A Digital Strategy for the National Gallery of Art (2017-2018). He currently serves as co-investigator on the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War (2025-2035). Tanner’s work has significantly influenced the museum sector’s approach to open access through research on image use and sales in American art museums, promoting initiatives like OpenGLAM. He also edited the Open Library of Humanities journal from 2015 to 2016.