Dr Nicholas Sparks
Visiting Research Fellow
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics
Dr Nicholas A. Sparks, BA (Hons), M.LIS (Librarianship), PhD (Cantab), ASARPVisiting Research Fellow, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics, University of Adelaide (Australia).I hold a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a Masters of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from the University of Canberra. I am a cultural heritage consultant, historian and researcher with more than 20 years of experience in libraries, archives, universities and cultural institutions. I am an Associate Member of the Auctioneers and Valuers Association of Australia (AVAA), and I am qualified to authenticate, catalogue, appraise and value manuscripts, books and archives.I am passionate about building, preserving and sharing unique and significant collections of documentary heritage materials, and making these available to the people of Australia and beyond. I am strongly committed to working with Aboriginal peoples and communities to care for, steward, and respectfully share Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) collections in responsible, culturally safe ways.
Dr Nicholas A. Sparks, Ba (Hons), M.LIS, PhD (Cantab), ASARP
A strand of research currently explores surviving books of First Fleet provenance and other prime Association Australiana — and asks: what value do we set on such books and why? A special focus is the power of provenance — considering books as tangible links to the past.
Standing at the cross-roads of intellectual and financial values, I am deeply interested in exploring market influences on the buying and selling of association copies. In the light of high prices fetched in recent decades indicates changing views on what most influences a book's value.
Beyond importance, rarity, condition, I argue, what A. W. Pollard described as the ‘imaginative’ appeal of such books –– especially which stems from provenance –– is much more powerful. To own such a book –– to have and to hold an original object of iconic association Australiana –– gives to the book a magnetism, or talismanic quality, that is altogether harder to define.
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Journals
Year Citation 2023 Sparks, N. A., Windram, H. F., & Howe, C. J. (2023). The transmission of ‘The West Saxon Royal Genealogy’: a phylogenetic approach. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38(2), 737-749.
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