Senior Library Assistant (Research Support)

at  Kings College London

Job id: 093086. Salary: £32,979 - £36,396 per annum, including London Weighting Allowance.
Posted: 23 July 2024. Closing date: 11 August 2024.
Business unit: Students & Education. Department: Research & Impact.
Contact details: Chris Fripp (Open Access Manager). christopher .1.fripp@kcl.ac.uk
Location: Strand Campus. Category: Professional & Support Services.
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About Us
The King’s community is dedicated to the service of society. King’s Strategic Vision 2029 sets out our vision for the future, shaped around five priority areas: educate to inspire and improve; research to inform and innovate; serve to shape and transform; a civic university at the heart of London; and an international community that services the world. Our ambitious Education Strategy sets out the actions that we must take to transform how we teach, how and where our students learn and how we support them during their time with us.
We are excited to be recruiting to the role of Senior Library Assistant (Research Support) at a time when Open Research has never been more important. Our Open Research team is responsible for working with King’s researchers in an exciting, complex, and fast-moving area. The team works to support the curation and dissemination of scholarly outputs – support for open access publishing, REF, research data management, and copyright; alongside the provision of an interlending service and wide range of subscription-based library resources.
Libraries & Collections comprises four departments: Education & Learning, Research & Impact, Service Design & Delivery, along with Business Operations. We are part of the Students & Education Directorate, which manages the student lifecycle from application to graduation and beyond.
About the role
Open Research is an innovative and growing area of service provision. Senior Library Assistants within the Research Support wing of the team provide support to King’s researchers in curating and disseminating their scholarly outputs to a wide audience.
This is an exciting opportunity for candidates looking to work within open research, who wish to utilise their skills in understanding, organising, and explaining complex information. This is an opportunity to grow skills in navigating the scholarly publishing landscape and helping to educate King’s research community about our services - supporting them with achieving impacts with their research findings.
We encourage applications from candidates who have experience from both within and outside of the higher education sector where they can demonstrate the skills needed to succeed in this role.
This is a full-time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered an indefinite contract if successful.
All grade 4 staff are assigned a placement brief within a particular team but may be moved across to a different placement brief elsewhere within Libraries & Collections in order to support service needs or your development.
All Libraries & Collections staff are encouraged to take responsibility for their own performance and development, through agreeing clear objectives, maintaining professional awareness, participating in professional networks, and reflecting on own performance. We expect all colleagues to role-model a positive, proactive, flexible, and committed approach that encourages others.
You will be required to participate in frontline services as required, including contributing towards a rota for evening and weekend working.
About You
To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

• Relevant work experience and/or education: we think a wide range of different work and educational experiences could support you to be successful in this role. Relevant work experience might include work in a library, for a publisher, or at a university. Relevant educational experiences might include higher education in a related discipline, professional qualifications, or other training.
• Awareness of open research matters – such as: the research life cycle, research funding, open access publishing, repositories, issues related to the management, curation, and preservation of digital data.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, including the ability to present information to a range of different audiences.
• Experience of working with specialist database systems such as finance, library, repository, or research information applications.
• Ability to work to a high level of accuracy and attention to detail.
• Experience in positively and proactively dealing with routine problems.
• Experience of working in a customer-oriented environment and delivery high quality services.
• Ability to work effectively and proactively with own team, other teams and with our stakeholders.
• Ability to work under pressure and meet challenging deadlines.
• Commitment to equity, equality, diversity ,and inclusivity in your own learning and ways of working.

Desirable criteria

• Educated to degree level and/or professionally accredited library/information/archives qualification.
• Clear understanding of the roles of libraries in society and in higher education.
• Experience of supervising staff.
• Knowledge of copyright compliance or licensing.
• Knowledge of repository systems, library management systems, or experience of working with scholarly metadata.

Full details of the role and the skills and experience required can be found in the attached job description which is provided on the next page.
Further information
We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.
We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King’s.
Please submit a supporting statement when applying for this vacancy, clearly setting out how you meet the essential criteria, as this is how we shortlist applications. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.
To find out how our managers review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.
This role does not meet the requirements of the Home Office and therefore we are not able to offer sponsorship for candidates who require the right to work in the UK.

Please refer the Job description for details