Since 2007 she has worked in the cultural heritage sector and is regarded as "increasingly a go-to expert on digital archives".

[2] Oates was born in Adelaide, Australia, to an Australian father and a British mother, and is the youngest of three siblings.

[citation needed] In 1996, Oates was in the first group of employees at the Ngapartji Multimedia Centre in Adelaide, where she taught the general public how to use the internet and went on to teach courses in HTML and web design.

[12] From 2011 to 2014, Oates was art director at San Francisco data visualization studio Stamen Design.

[19] She is also a non-executive director of Postal Heritage Services, a subsidiary of The Postal Museum, and is on the advisory board of the British Library Labs[20] initiative, a Mellon Foundation-funded program to increase access to the library's collections.