Assistant Director reflects on 30 years in the Library

On her retirement, Liz Davis, Library Assistant Director, talks about her time in the Library and looks forward to the future

Liz Davis, one of the Library’s two Assistant Directors, will retire from Imperial at the end of June after nearly 30 years service. It has been a pleasure to work with her and library staff wish her all the very best for the future.  Here, we talk to her about her time working in the Library and her plans for retirement.

Can you tell us how you started working at Imperial and about the roles you have had here?

I started working at the Hammersmith Campus, which was then the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, as an Assistant Librarian.  A large part of my job was doing online literature searching to find information for researchers and academics.  It was before the days of the internet and involved connecting a dumb terminal to a mainframe computer in Switzerland using an acoustic coupler. You were charged by the minute for the time you were connected which really concentrated the mind. After that I became Campus Library Manager at Hammersmith before taking up my current post of Assistant Director: Faculty Support Services where I have been responsible for the faculty and front of house teams providing services to students and staff.

How has the Library changed over the years?

In lots of ways. It’s much more customer focused than when I started. Nowadays, we really try hard to provide the services that staff and students want, rather than what is easy for us to provide or what we think they may want. For example, 24/7 opening would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago. The shift from print collections to electronic collections is another big change. There were no online journals or e-books when I started and probably about 75% of the library space at the Hammersmith Campus was taken up with rows and rows of back runs of journals. The job of keeping the photocopy room clear of journal volumes was a mammoth task. It’s also a much more complex information environment; the internet means that there is a huge amount of information out there and many more ways of managing and communicating information, such as websites, blogs, wikis, twitter, and the like. The role of the Librarian has changed accordingly and we now do a lot of information skills teaching to help people make the most of all the new sources and web tools out there.

What have been your most memorable moments?

Some of my most memorable moments have been associated with the introduction of new technology, starting with the acquisition of our first PC sometime in the 1980s. It was a CIFER and used an operating system called CPM with a 10MB hard disk and a 520K floppy disk drive. It was the highest spec PC you could buy at the time and cost £4.5K. Also, the transformation of many of our physical libraries. The Hammersmith Campus library has been completely redesigned in recent years with study, teaching and social space in place of all those rows of shelving, and the ground floor of the Central Library is now a great space for group study. 

What is your vision for the future of the Library?

I think there will be an increasing shift to electronic resources as e-books really start to take off but I still think that the physical library will retain its importance as a centre for learning. Space freed up by the reduction in the size of physical collections will be transformed into different kinds of study space to suit different learning patterns and personal preferences. But there will always be a need for quiet study and the Library will continue to be one of the few places on campus which provides this. As for librarians, I think we will be even more integrated into our university’s core functions of teaching, learning and research. Whether through our teaching of academic and information skills, through the services we provide to enhance the student experience or through the specialist support we provide to research groups, I’m confident that we will continue play an important role in the university of the future.

What plans do you have for your retirement?

I never had a gap year so I’m planning to do a lot more travelling with my husband who is also retiring this year. We are both keen scuba divers and we’re looking forward to having the time to visit some of the more remote diving destinations. We’re also planning to travel in Europe and are in the process of kitting out an MPV with camping gear. I must say, I’m really looking forward to it!