Jill Cousins
Executive Director, EDL Foundation
Jill Cousins is Programme Director of The European Library and Executive Director of the EDL Foundation, She began at the National Library of the Netherlands in 2004, after the finish of the TEL project and was responsible for creating the operational service The European Library. The success so far of this service has led to the European Union giving their strategic backing to The European Library for the creation of the European Digital Library, Europeana
She has a strong web publishing background, having worked for VNU as their European Business Development Director and then transferred the lessons learnt from commercial business-to-business publishing to scholarly publishing working for Blackwell Publishing and several other academic publishers in the UK. Prior to a publishing career, she worked in the online environment for many years, first as a researcher with her own company First Contact (now owned by Thomson). After selling this company Jill worked as the Event & Marketing Director for Online Information. Combining the skills of web publishing, marketing, research knowledge and business development she heads the growing cluster of pan European sites giving access to the material held in our museums, libraries, archives and audio visual collections.
Jill holds a Geography degree and a Ph.D in 16th Century Arabic and Turkish Sea Charts.