Career history: Celia
What do the following have in common?
1.Two months working in New York with the UK Mission to the UN
2. A ride inside a tank and climbing into an AS-90
3. Seeing your name in print in professional journals and even a book
4. Having the Red Arrows, A380 & a Nighthawk practice manoeuvres over your head
5. An official reception at Buckingham Palace
6. Playing croquet & discussing HDTV on the lawns of an Elizabethan manor house
7. Visiting Army bases in Northern Ireland and Germany
8. Being told by a customer that your work saves him £9,000 a year minimum
Answer: a career in Government libraries!
This sector’s a good place to be and it’s full of opportunities if you’re willing to take them….
Having completed a SCONUL placement at the Science Museum Library I went to Sheffield to obtain my Masters in Librarianship and then fell into a year’s contract with the BBC’s Engineering Research Department – high definition TV, digital audio broadcasting and radio cameras were all in their infancy at that stage. An interest in science and technology had been ignited, but it was put on hold for 4 years whilst I joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Two years of being an embedded librarian with the FCO’s UN Department and dealing with UN Security Council resolutions at the height of the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict led me to a short foray into legal information at the FCO’s Legal Library. Then a completely new area, Deputy Head of the FCO’s Library Purchasing where one of my tasks was to negotiate a sizeable discount to put a BT Phone Disk into every British Embassy around the world.
I then reached for the skies and took up a post with the Civil Aviation Authority’s Safety Regulation Group, possibly not the smartest move for someone who dislikes being in a plane herself! But there was still a hankering to run my own unit again and the opportunity arose to join the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, part of the Ministry of Defence (MOD).
Nine years later I left what was now called the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory having been variously Information Centre Manager, Team Leader, Information Specialist and Project Support. I’d worked in Kent, Surrey and Wiltshire at 5 of their key sites and dealt with subject areas covering everything from tanks and armoured vehicles, forensics and explosives to military aircraft testing and evaluation and military operational analysis, plus electronic document and records management systems. My professional development and awareness had increased out of all proportion. Due to the support of the organisation I was now chartered and a mentor, and the Chair of Cilip’s newest Special Interest Group: the Aerospace & Defence Librarians Group. My work had been published America and I’d presented at Umbrella, the UK’s key biennial LIS conference.
I haven’t gone far, I’m still with the MoD and now responsible for 19 Army Library and Information Services, stretching from Oxfordshire to Dorset, Wiltshire to Kent as well as Nepal and Brunei, so hopefully further adventures await me…