Lou Burnard (born 1946 in Birmingham, England) is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) from 2001 to September 2010 where he officially retired from OUCS. Prior to that, he was manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at OUCS for five years. He has worked in ICT support for research in the humanities since the 1990s. He was one of the founding editors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and continues to play an active part in its maintenance and development, as a consultant to the TEI Technical Council and as an elected TEI board member. He has played a key role in the establishment of many other key activities and initiatives in