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 discomfort 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 disenchanted in her original career – she was a post-doctoral researcher in genetics – was because she felt that research was supported 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 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 Sheffield 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 Sheffield. And I loved it.”

Recently, she also discovered that there was librarianship in the family. Beth’s great aunt, Ruth Cranfield, was an academic librarian at Durham University in the first half of the 20th Century, but wasn’t allowed to continue once she was married.

“In a way it feels like she had the first part 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 policies. 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 conscious 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 fellow researchers rather than just her research. “I’ve always done a lot of community-based work. I set up a Sheffield branch of Ignite to support PhD 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.

“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 (Science 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 welcoming. 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 supporting the researcher. That’s what I think this conference does. It supports the researcher 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 letting 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 Norman who described in detail two weeks working at the Crick, in a blog post which included “the challenges of persuading researchers to follow new sets of rules.”

Beth said: “A big part of the job ad was that they wanted someone with knowledge of data research management – it is one of the services they are building in the next few years. It is one of the reasons why I was appointed – I did this work at Nottingham University.

“I came in when we were trying to get people to buy in and follow a new policy. So, I spent the last three years helping researchers understand policies, explaining why we’re putting these requirements in place and then encouraging them to do it.

“At the Crick, their researchers are already doing a lot of data management and open research, but in quite an independent way and the library hasn’t been formally helping with that. One advantage at the Crick is that all research at the institution is funded by MRC, CRUK and Wellcome, not just by individual researcher’s grants. And these organisations have clear ideas about what they want people to do with open research and what direction they’d like to move in. It is part of the ethos of the funders and the institution, but it will still be difficult to push forward best-practice across the board… because it always is.”

She thinks this is where the strength of a library lies. “It’s less about asking people to follow rules – although there are rules. The key is getting them to see the vision that it will improve their research, make it more reproducible and reliable, and give it greater impact. It’s much better to talk to people about that, rather than about ‘well your funder says you have to put it into x,y,z…’.”

Covid in a bottle

Beth is a little in awe of the Covid effect, saying: “One of the things that was really interesting about Covid is that we’d spent years trying to get people to use the cloud for data storage and Teams for collaborative working. Then everyone went home in May 2020 and switched. Just like that. A thing that we’d spent years trying to change-manage.

“We can’t have a pandemic every time we want people to change digital technologies but it worked very well this time. It was the need. Often, we’re trying to change things and people can’t see why. The pandemic showed people the need and they immediately changed. It’s a really interesting thing to think about because when people see it as necessary, they are quite happy to change. But usually they think we’re just saying ‘change this’ because we say so. Or it’s our latest fad and it will change again in two years. I can see why people are resistant to it at that point.”

Stamina needed

Beth says technology in higher education and research isn’t likely to slow down. She expects big changes every five years: “You can see why people think ‘oh god, not again’. That’s why we have to try harder to show them why it will work for them. It’s not about us pushing what we want. It’s about going to the researchers and asking ‘what do you need?’ But it’s hard to do and takes a lot of manpower and time.

“We changed open access repositories at Nottingham four years ago and we were still trying to get people to use it instead of the system that they had learnt 10 years before. They struggled to see why it was better. But it joins up much more easily with other technology and there’s way more that we can do with it. But if we can’t visualise that for them, then they aren’t going to learn it.

“And there will be more of these challenges. I don’t think it’ll ever change. What we currently call digital transformation seems like a discreet project, but digital transformation in the wider sense never changes, we keep going.”

But in the same way that the problem will persist, she thinks the solution will too. “It can get really annoying. I even find it annoying when I’m on the other side. There needs to be a need. If we’re changing software it needs to tap into the needs of both the patrons and staff.”

Visionary

At the Crick Beth hopes to have room to think strategically. “I don’t think I’ll be spending as much of my time on operational work. Partly because it’s not where my skills lie, but mainly because I would rather be looking at the big picture. Much of it, like collection management and OA is fairly well established so, while there’s a lot of work to be done, people know what they are doing. But we’re looking at new services within open research, initially supporting data sharing and archiving to promote research integrity. It will involve a lot of talking to researchers and other support teams and finding out what is needed.”

But where there are gaps, she will be leading with a vision. “It sounds way too grand but I’m what the HR courses refer to as a ‘visionary leader’. I lead from a vision, a goal, an end point. I don’t really know how to do it any other way. I’m confused if I talk to a leader and I ask ‘but where are we going?’ and they can’t really picture that for me. I like to say ‘look this is the dream’ and then ask the staff with the knowledge and expertise to work with me to get there. I think that’s what leaders are for.

“It’s the same thing as trying to get people to use new technology. You say there might be a bit of pain to get there, but you paint this glowing image of the future that makes it worthwhile.”

Profession

“The profession has been a lot more than I thought it was going to be,” Beth says, “I left research and thought I’d be sitting in a library answering questions. That’s not what I’ve done at all. I still do research. I have a paper coming out on research support and I’m writing a book on EDI initiatives in libraries. So, I’m still very ideas-driven, and libraries give people space to do that if they want to.”

However, she believes her fellow librarians can sometimes have an unnecessary lack of confidence when it comes to Research Data Management as opposed to Open Access: “Librarians are quite happy with Open Access because it is books and journal articles – the written word. But with open data, they often feel they don’t really understand the data. I don’t think that matters. All they need to think about is that there’s an output which contains information and knowledge, that can be described using metadata, and we want to get it out there and make it discoverable. I don’t understand the content of every journal article I help make openly available.

“Mostly when people are doing data management it is not split up by subject. As a history librarian you can dig into all the history resources and learn about them, but a data librarian often has to support someone from history, then 15 minutes later you’re supporting someone from engineering or biology. I don’t think extensive experience with data is necessary, although a general knowledge is needed, that’s the bit that scares people though.

“They think they need to understand all of the data and I don’t think they do. In the same way I can’t read a historian’s journal article and know if there’s something wrong in it, for most data I can’t look at it either and say ‘oh that’s wrong’. They don’t need to be able to write a program or understand the data from an MRI. As librarians what we can do is talk to researchers and find out about their data and their research, and then think about how other researchers might find the research, or what they might be searching for and translate that into best practice in managing and sharing data.”