Dr. William Noel, the John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections in the Princeton University Library, died on April 29 from injuries sustained in a traffic accident in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 58.
“It’s just such a shocking and random loss,” Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor at the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, told The Daily Princetonian in an interview. “He was on the sidewalk, and this van jumped the curb and hit him. If he was 30 seconds ahead or 30 seconds behind, it wouldn’t have happened. It’s just one of those absolutely horrific freak accidents that has taken him from us … it’s really hard to wrap your head around it.”
Davis was one of the first of Noel’s colleagues to announce his death publicly on X. The two met during their work at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and quickly became friends.
“It’s really an unimaginable loss personally, but also, professionally — for the entire field [of Medieval Studies],” Davis shared. “If you look online, you’ll see the tributes on Twitter from people who never even met him, but just heard him give a lecture or watched his TED talk.”
Noel, who also served as the Chair of the Philadelphia Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, led numerous projects to digitize and data-mine the pre-modern manuscripts of the mid-Atlantic region.
Noel completed his PhD in Medieval Studies at Cambridge University and was then hired as curator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. There, he transformed the field of Medieval Studies as he worked to digitize medieval manuscripts and make them freely available for public consumption.
“Some manuscripts were available online at the time of his work, but it was really difficult to actually download those images and use them,” Davis said of Noel. “His mentality was, ‘this is the cultural heritage of the world, and it should be available to the world.’”
Davis remarked upon Noel’s commitment to preserving history of all lineages.
“This was another way that he really was an innovator — he really considered the non-Western material, which often gets short shrift, to be equivalent to Western material,” Davis added. “Back then, that was really radical.”
Beyond his professional success, Noel was a leader in bringing people together for a common purpose.
“He had this incredible gift for finding the right people, for any particular team and convincing them that they should stop whatever they’re doing, and come and be part of this team because we’re going to change the world together,” Davis shared. “And that’s exactly what he did. That’s why he really belonged in those leadership positions…Anyone who’s worked for him will tell you stories of how kind he was, and how empathetic and how understanding he was of any personal problems that anybody was going through.”
Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Humanities at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and one of Noel’s former colleagues, echoed Davis’s sentiments.
“I saw [Noel] deliver a lecture about his [current] project and talked to him after. I thought he was the most amazing person I ever met … so engaging and so interesting,” Porter said in an interview with the ‘Prince’.
“He was a visionary. And he saw me as someone who could see his vision ... I have had the best time working in the digital humanities here, and it was all because of him,” she said.
Porter remarked on how Noel’s contributions to Medieval Studies have permanently changed it.
“He was the first to really push the concept of openness in the field, and it has now become an accepted standard in the discipline,” Porter told the ‘Prince.’ “He changed the field for all of us. And we can keep moving forward in that direction, for him … and we will.”
Caitlyn Tablada is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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