Group Committee

Athanasios Velios is Reader in Documentation at the University of the Arts London, working on conservation documentation. He trained as a conservator in Greece (Technological Educational Institute of Athens) and completed his PhD in London (Royal College of Arts, 2002) on computer applications to conservation.

He worked on the St. Catherine’s Monastery condition survey project, designing the project databases and documentation forms, and he developed the framework for the Language of Bindings Thesaurus. He was the webmaster for the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (2008–2017), where he redeveloped the Institute’s website. He established the Documentation Network of the Institute of Conservation (Icon) in the UK. He worked as Data Architect for the Oxford Linked Open Data pilot (OXLOD, 2018). He has been contributing to the CIDOC-CRM SIG since 2014 and, alongside Kristen St. John, he co-led the Linked Conservation Data project: an AHRC-funded project to enable integration of conservation records.

Francesca Whymark ACR is an accredited book conservator and works at the British Library in London. She has a BA in History of Art & Architecture and Italian from Trinity College Dublin (2006) and studied Book Conservation at Camberwell College of Arts, gaining a Foundation Degree (2010) and Masters (2011), before joining the British Library in 2011.

She has a particular interest in book conservation terminology and documentation. She worked as a research assistant during the early stages of the Language of Bindings project and was a founding member of the Icon Documentation Network. She has served on the Book & Paper group Events & Training sub-committee and was managing editor for the Adapt & Evolve conference postprints. She was a member of the organising committee for the inaugural IIC Student & Emerging Conservators conference. She is currently representing Conservation and Collection Care within a major infrastructure project at the British Library, which aims to unify the Library’s collection metadata assets on a single, sustainable, standards-based infrastructure offering improved options for access, collaboration and open reuse.