#citylis alumna Helen Cargill. She’s now Head of Research Support of Library Services at King’s College London.
Winning a place to study an MSc in Library Science at City University London was an important step towards fulfilling my ambition to forge a new career in a field I had set my sights on after much consideration. After eighteen months working in my first library job at King’s College London – part of a library resources subscriptions team, I knew I was on the right path and that qualifying was the route to progress my career and affirm my commitment to becoming a library and information professional.
Six months after starting the course in 2011 an opportunity arose in my department at King’s to create and manage a new team called ‘Digital Assets’. The team had a dual focus – providing support for teaching and learning via the provision of a digitisation service, and supporting research activity around scholarly communications by supporting a new research information system and institutional repository. I worked as Digital Assets Manager for three and half years, growing the team and the services we provided – notably developing the support we provided for open access publishing.
A screen shot of King’s Research Portal. It is available at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/
Over the past year the team has evolved and expanded as part of wider realignments. The digitisation service now sits within another library team who manage our online reading lists service, the title ‘Digital Assets’ has been retired, and we have become (Library) Research Support. I applied for and am now Head of Research Support.
The purpose of my role is to lead the provision of library research support services across the King’s College London community in partnership with different stakeholders. I oversee and contribute to the strategic direction of services and systems supporting scholarly publications and research data management. This includes the provision of administration, training and guidance on open access publishing, use of the institutional repository, support for bibliometrics, copyright, and the management, preservation, and discoverability of research data.
It’s early days in the role, but I have big ambitions for the team, lots of ideas, and am fortunate to work with talented colleagues who are equally passionate about developing and delivering innovative library services to support King’s researchers.
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