About Athenaeum21

We have decades of experience providing forward-looking vision and anticipating trends.

Who We Are

Christine Madsen, MLIS, DPhil

Dr. Christine Madsen works at the intersection of cultural organizations and technology. She is expert in building large-scale systems, teams, and services that use technology to connect researchers, teachers, and students with digital research data. She works to understand and build the knowledge organizations of the future–occasionally taking inspiration from those of the past. 

Before co-founding A21 with Megan, Christine was the Head of Digital Programmes at the Bodleian Libraries (University of Oxford), where she was the visionary behind the digital.bodleian project, a completely new, sustainable and scalable architecture for delivering Oxford’s diverse and unique collections online. Prior to that, she led the Open Collections Program (OCP) at Harvard University Library, where she created cross-departmental, collaborative workflows and scaled OCP from a project to a department. During her time at Oxford, Christine worked with diverse stakeholders across the many libraries, faculties, divisions, and museums to strategize and build coherent solutions for the evolving needs of the University. In addition to leading the development of the Strategic Plan for the Bodleian Libraries, she helped to write and implement a Digital Humanities Strategy for the University and a vision for a unified, sustainable ‘Digital Oxford’ which will provide seamless digital research support across all faculties and collections. Christine earned her DPhil from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), where she performed one of the first large-scale ethnographic studies of an entire discipline to understand its relationship to digital technology and the library.

Education

Oxford University
DPhil, Information, Communications, and the Social Sciences

San Jose State University
MLIS

University of California - San Diego
BA, Visual Arts

Megan Hurst, MLIS, MFA

Megan Hurst helps clients understand and boldly respond to their changing landscapes by facilitating deep, human-centered inquiry, design, and creative thinking. She is skilled at uncovering strengths of both people and organizations, eliciting opportunities and challenges for clients, and helping them confidently create new paths forward.

Before co-founding Athenaeum21 with Christine, Megan led user research, user experience, internationalization and accessibility initiatives at EBSCO Information Services, most recently serving as Director of Product Management for the EBSCO Discovery Service and EBSCOhost platforms. She led the user experience research and definition for searching in multiple languages on the EBSCOhost platform, and the design of the EBSCOhost mobile websites. In this and previous product manager roles, she helped shape the end-user experience of library researchers worldwide. Both an ethnographer and a technologist at heart, she is skilled at understanding business and user requirements, aligning diverse stakeholders on a shared vision, and developing tools and methods for consensus and prioritization. 

Prior to EBSCO, Megan was the architect of the Harvard University Library's first large-scale impact assessment and reporting program at the pioneering Open Collections Program (OCP). Prior to OCP, Megan worked as a management consultant with MIDIOR, serving clients ranging from venture-funded start-ups to Fortune 100 enterprises  to non-profits across diverse industries. Megan has over 30 years’ experience in museums, libraries, publishing, and non-profit organizations, including service on boards, and in securing grant funding from government agencies and private foundations.

Education

University of Rhode Island
MLIS

Massachusetts College of Art & Design
MFA, Integrated Media

Smith College
BA, Visual Arts