Summary
Chris Banks, FRSA, is Director of Library Services
Chris joined Imperial College in September 2013 as Director of Library Services. She has over fourteen years’ experience at library director level in higher education, and over 20 years in a variety of curatorial, management and strategic roles at the British Library. Between 2016 and 2022 she additionally held the post of Assistant Provost (Space).
Chris is the strategic lead for Library Services at Imperial College.
Chris's areas of expertise include strategy, organisational change, space, open science and scholarly communications, public engagement, and her original discipline, music.
Chris is a member of the Jisc UUK Content Negotiations Strategy Group, she chairs the Jisc UUK Content Expert Group, she is an elected Board member of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), and a member of the SCONUL Content Strategy Group. She was a member of the UUK Open Access Monographs Group and the Steering Group for the Pricing Transparency work.
Chris is leading an initiative to roll out a model institutional open access rights retention policy for UK HE institutions based on the Harvard model.
Before joining Imperial, Chris served as University Librarian and Director of Library, Special Collections and Museums at the University of Aberdeen where she was the library lead on the award-winning £57m library project, The Sir Duncan Rice Library which was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in September 2012
Chris continues her interest in music, acting as Trustee to a number of music research organisations, acting as Open Access advisor to the Royal Musical Association, and as a soprano member of the London Philharmonic Choir.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Banks C, 2016, Focusing upstream: Supporting scholarly communication by academics, Insights: the Uksg Journal, Vol:29, Pages:37-44
Chapters
Banks CA, 2013, From stronghold to threshold: new Library and new opportunities, University Libraries and Space in the Digital World, Editor(s): Matthews, Walton, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Pages:85-100, ISBN:9781409423829