Catherine Owen is currently Executive Director of the Performing Arts Data Service (PADS), one of five distributed agencies of the UK-based Arts and Humanities Data Service, and has been part of the PADS team at the University of Glasgow since its inception in 1997. Catherine holds a postgraduate Master's degree in Information and Library Studies and is particularly interested in the development of description standards for non-textual materials. In addition to her role at the PADS, Catherine is involved in a number of national and international initiatives in the digital libraries arena and acts as project management advisor to projects
undertaking large-scale digitisation or description activities in educational and cultural heritage organisations across the UK. Catherine was previously librarian at the Scottish Music Information Centre.