of the career, and then I’ve jumped straight into the second half, continuing on her work,” Beth says.
Yes, a library
At first the library label was superficial: “Yes, I knew I wanted to be an academic librarian, but it was because I was going into it to support researchers. I wasn’t going into it to be a librarian. I would have taken a job in a research and innovation team, or something like that, because a number of institutions don’t manage repositories and research data management through libraries.” That view has changed. “Now I think it’s always a mistake if universities move data management to research and innovation teams. It nearly always becomes about compliance with pol- icies. But in the library we approach from the other direction. It is not about compliance, it’s about helping people to do ‘the thing’. We’re not ticking people off a list, we’re helping them do their work. And that’s why these services need to be in the library. You’re better off helping people from libraries than from anywhere else.”
Library instincts
In her academic career Beth was con- scious of access issues: “Everything I ever published was open access. I was always interested in new models and one of the papers I was most proud of was a very early publication in the PeerJ journal which was looking at more sustainable and affordable ways to pay for publication.”
But much of her focus was on the experience that she and her peers were having and initiatives for fel- low researchers rather than just her research. “I’ve always done a lot of community-based work. I set up a Shef- field branch of Ignite to support PhD
January-February 2023
Beth Montague-Hellen.
students to talk about their research, and worked with ECR chat, a Twitter-based event where we’d spend an hour talking about a career-based issue.”
But the best known is LGBTQ+ STEM, a project that helps LGBTQ+ researchers to find their place within science. In 2020 it won the Royal Society Athena Prize award for Beth and her co organiser, Alex Bond. (
https://bit.ly/3k7mEJA).
“I was a post-doc when I first developed it. It fitted a need that I had, which was to meet other people that had similar experiences.”
The conference – where any STEM (Sci- ence Tech Engineering Maths) researcher can present their work – now attracts hundreds of attendees every year: “We do it in one day and everyone goes to all the talks, even if it’s right outside your area of expertise. That’s the thing that I love – and that was one of the things that drew me to libraries – the breadth of things that I’d be supporting. That’s what I like about research support, I’ll talk to a senior researcher in one field and then a post-graduate student studying something completely different. This conference does the same kind of thing. It introduces people to all sorts of interesting concepts and different people.”
As a researcher these activities were extra-curricular. “Now I’m a librarian, the ability to do that professionally is great. I can now do those things as part of my job now.”
Impact on researchers
“Essentially the talks are science research talks like you’d get in any conference,” Beth says, “But LGBTQ+ people tend to spend a lot of time checking themselves – ‘am I wearing something that is sensible and conservative? How am I talking?’ – but here they can be who they naturally are. The audience is completely welcom- ing. It is something that a lot of people have really appreciated.
“One of the things that I always say is that research support is not just about supporting the research, it is about sup- porting the researcher. That’s what I think this conference does. It supports the re- searcher to be who they are, and because of that they can bring their whole selves and do the best research that they can.” In a video on the Royal Society website Beth asks: “How can you come up with amazing, exciting, cool, new ideas for your research when a quarter of your brain is too busy worrying about what you’re let- ting out to the world?”, and provides her own answer: “You’ve got to be able to give it everything.”
The Crick
Beth started her new job as Head of Library and Information Services at the Francis Crick Institute in November 2022. She follows in the footsteps of Frank Nor- man who described in detail two weeks working at the Crick, in a blog post (http://
occamstypewriter.org/trading-knowledge/) which
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