Scott Pennington

Scott Pennington is Head of Digitizing and African Projects at Matrix, The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University. The Digital Lab at Matrix specializes in both the use and creation of multimedia for online learning as well as migrating and converting rare and obsolete multimedia formats into archival quality digital files for educational use.

During his time at Matrix, Pennington has published on using Internet technologies in education and on expanding Internet use to include audio and visual resources in unique ways. He has taught courses in humanities technology, Internet design, and specializes in digitizing endangered and/or rare cultural resources for preservation and wider access. Recent collaborations include consultations and/or partnerships with the Archives of Michigan; the Sakaly and Cissé Photography Archives in Bamako, Mali; the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal; the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India; King Abdul Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the National Records Service for The Gambia; the ANC Archives in Johannesburg, South Africa; and, at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

Pennington is also a participant and author in the forthcoming IMLS funded Guide to Conducting Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA). This project will help create and standardize new methods for audio and video recordings for Oral History using digital equipment, as well as new standards for long-term archival storage of the digital recordings.

As Co-PI, he’s recently been awarded a British Library Endangered Archive Project grant for digitizing cultural heritage resources in Bamako, Mali. This project began November of 2011 and results will be forthcoming and online before November 2012.