INTERVIEW
The need for need
The pandemic pushed people into new technology at speed. Beth Montague-Hellen, the new Head of Library and Information Services at the Francis Crick Institute, asks how big changes like this can be achieved without the help of a crisis.
HUMANS will always struggle when the tools they use are upgraded. “When I’m in my sixties, at the end of my career I’m sure there will be some other new massive technology and I’ll be saying ‘oh no, can’t we just use Teams?’ ”. Beth Montague-Hellen doubts the discom- fort will be any less for new generations, saying: “People are expecting more now. Undergrads have seen so much change that they expect new technology to come out all the time. But I don’t subscribe to the digital native idea. People know what they know. They learn how to do certain things but they cannot always transition what they’ve learned into the next bit of technology. So even though there are new people coming into the workforce who expect things to change, it’s probably not going to make it any easier for them.”
Library?
Many organisations try to inspire changes in their workforces. Beth has witnessed the limitations of top-down culture change, where the focus is on what an organisation needs. One of the reasons she became dis- enchanted in her original career – she was a post-doctoral researcher in genetics – was because she felt that research was support- ed but researchers often were not. As an academic she did a lot of work to remedy this, particularly in relation to LGBTQ+ issues. It was this interest in the human rather than organisational problems that began her gravitation towards libraries: “It wasn’t like ‘yes libraries, that’s the way to go’. Most people have no clue what we do in
22 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Senior Reporter, Information Professional.
libraries. I certainly didn’t. So, I was looking at anything within the university that was supporting new students and researchers.” Her motives were clear – to support new students and researchers – but how to pursue these aims was not clear. The idea of librarianship came via word of mouth: “I had a friend who was doing a libraries MA in Sheffi eld and we talked a lot about it, she said I probably had more reasons to do it than she did. So, I started a masters at Sheffi eld. And I loved it.”
Recently, she also discovered that there was librarianship in the family. Beth’s great aunt, Ruth Cranfi eld, was an academic librarian at Durham University in the fi rst half of the 20th Century, but wasn’t allowed to continue once she was married. “In a way it feels like she had the fi rst part
January-February 2023
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