The Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project

Staff for Phase 1 of the project

All staff are based at the Natural History Museum, London, UK.

Project Director (20% of FTE – 3 years): Dr George Beccaloni (e-mail g.beccaloni@nhm.ac.uk).
George is the founder and PI of the WCP. He isresponsible for the overall direction of the project, for designing and maintaining the project’s database and website, for project publicity, fundraising, editorial decisions etc.

George is an evolutionary biologist/entomologist who is the Curator of Orthopteroid Insects (grasshoppers and their relatives) in the NHM's Department of Life Sciences. He has studied aspects of Wallace's life and work for about 10 years and is one of three co-executors of Wallace’s Literary Estate. George is the founder of the A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund, which is responsible for restoring Wallace’s grave in Broadstone, Dorset and for funding monuments to him at his birthplace and elsewhere (see http://wallacefund.info/). He played a key role in helping the NHM purchase the world's largest and most important collection of Wallace’s manuscripts, books and insect specimens from Wallace's grandsons in 2002. George has written several articles about Wallace and is co-editor of the book Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2008 (2nd edition in 2010). He was the Series/Historical Consultant for the highly acclaimed BBC programme about Wallace called Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero, and spent 3 weeks in Indonesia with the camera team and the Presenter Bill Bailey.

George has previously designed and managed two other large digitisation projects with online databases i.e. LepIndex: a uniquely comprehensive on-line synonymic catalogue of the living and fossil butterflies and moths of the world (see http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/lepindex/); and the Blattodea Species File Online (BSF), a comprehensive online synonymic catalogue of world cockroaches (see http://blattodea.speciesfile.org/HomePage.aspx).

Project Manager (10% of FTE – 3 years): Judith Magee (e-mail j.magee@nhm.ac.uk).
Judith is responsible for the day-to-day mechanics of the project e.g. managing project staff and the budget.

Judith is Curator of Library Special Collections in the NHM. She has worked for the Museum for about fifteen years and has secured grants and project managed several digitisation projects that have gone online. These include the art collections from Captain Cook’s three voyages and the art collections from the First Fleet.

Archivist (3 years full time): Caroline Catchpole (e-mail c.catchpole@nhm.ac.uk). 
Caroline is responsible for tracking-down and obtaining copies of letters in institutions worldwide, carrying out the process of due diligence, cataloguing the letters using the project's database system, and organising the scans and transcripts of the letters. She also manages the work of volunteers, writes posts for the WCP News blog etc.

Caroline has a Diploma in Archives & Records Management from UCL. She worked on the Mellon-funded Director's Correspondence Project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and as Project Record Officer in the Archives and Information Management team at King's College, London.

Digital Technician (15% of FTE – 3 years): Preparation of digital scans of letters.

Paper Conservator: Will make repairs and conserve letters where appropriate.