INTERVIEW
Finding treasure in Civil Service KIM
From helping shape government guidance on WhatsApp information management to maintaining collections of sunken treasure maps, David Smith, Deputy Director, Knowledge and Information Management, at Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and head of the Government KIM Profession, discusses the challenges facing KIM in the Civil Service.
ASKED why he chose the Civil Service above other areas of librarianship, David says: “It is just so interesting… it puts you in the centre of constantly changing challenges while offering unparalleled opportunities to move between librarianship, records man- agement, knowledge management, information governance throughout your career.” He gives an example from his early days at the Department for the Environment: “I remember in April 1986, I was on the library enquiry desk. A call comes down from the secretary of state’s office: ‘Could you find out anything about some place called’ – and they were a bit unsure about the spelling – ‘a place called Chernobyl? Apparently, some- thing has happened there.’”
Decades later his library role has shift- ed into managing across the full gamut of KIM-related disciplines, but he is still supporting the Government’s information needs in crises. Now it’s more likely to be in the form of leading KIM support for public inquiries like Grenfell and Covid, all the while contending with new technology and balancing simultaneous demands for corpo- rate transparency and personal privacy.
Regulatory load
With burgeoning amounts of information and regulation, is the job getting harder? “The job changes constantly – from the mid-
24 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is a journalist at Information Professional
80s when first introducing computer based interli- brary loans systems into the Civil Service, through the 1990s when I was establishing the Department of Health’s first internet site and its intranet, then into the 2000s when I was implementing the FOI regime in my current department, and currently supporting eDiscovery activities for Public Inquir- ies and preparing staff guidance on the use of AI. A common thread throughout all of this has been the application of my core librarianship skills in the exploitation of information. “Yes, we have to stay up to date with changes in legislation,” David says, “In September a statutory instrument came out stating the Government considers the United States of America ensures an adequate level of protection of personal data for
October-November 2023
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