M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries

Kings College, London

Following the appointment of Robert Hall as Director of Library Services and Employability in July 2011, a new Leadership Team is now in place: Patricia Methven, Head of Archives and Information Management; Laura Mackenzie, Head of Careers; Nick Woolley, Associate Director, Information Resources; Erin Caseley, Associate Director, Customer Services Strategy; and Gavin Beattie, Associate Director, Research and Learning Liaison.

Over the summer a £3.8m project transformed the College’s library at the Franklin-Wilkins Building at the Waterloo Campus. Developed in response to student feedback, the library now has sixteen group study rooms, flexible and social learning spaces, silent and graduate zones, and an IT training suite. Print journals have now been removed from the library which contains over 120k monographs. As part of the library refurbishment, front-of-house student support staff were relocated to the site and based near to the entrance. This is the beginning of a major project to bring together front-of-house student support across the College and make it visible and accessible. Staff have access to bookable “pods” for private meetings with students. King’s College London Students Union Advice workers also have a presence in the Library as part of the reconfigured service. Work is now commencing on refurbishing the libraries at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Weston Education Centre at King’s College Hospital both at the King’s Denmark Hill campus.

The Library’s Information Resources Section has been reviewed to increase capacity in key areas. Teams are now: Acquisitions & Discovery, Digital Assets, Subscriptions & Access, Service Development, and Business Support. The Section is responsible for the E-book Library project which has introduced patron-driven acquisition of e-books with over 400 titles being acquired so far this year.

News from AIM25 and King’s College London Archives
‘The Archive and Information Management team have had a particularly successful run of grant awards both in association with ULCC and independently. As the lead partners in AIM25 (Archives in the AIM 25 area) King’s and ULCC were awarded one of the eight JISC Discovery pilot awards to explore the methodology for take up of Linked Data within the community. (Linked Data will provide greatly enhanced access to online information and support cross domain working between libraries, archives and museums.) A successful follow up to that project, Step change, is now supporting the evolution of the pilot in three important ways :embedding the developed tool in CALM proprietary software for archival cataloguing (including non HE evaluation); evolving the UK Archival Thesaurus (to which many AIM25 partners have contributed specialist vocabularies) as an automated Linked data service analogous to Open Calais, and working with Historypin to create geo links between catalogue records and Historypin maps and images. Within King’s, the Trenches to Triples project will build on the thesaurus work and mark up detailed archival catalogues relating to the First World War using Linked Data. Terminology and links developed will be contributed to UKAT and available to the MLA community as commemorations of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War are being developed. These will provide detailed terms describing war concepts including battlefronts, subsidiary campaigns, locations and contemporary terminology. King’s, in conjunction with the Department of War Studies has been awarded a contract by JISC to prioritise academic requirements for original resources relating to the First World War. Alongside this work, King’s is digitising archives relating to the discovery of the DNA double helix in the 1950s as part of a Wellcome Trust-led project to create an online resource on the history of modern genetics. Partners in AIM25 may like to know that work has recently been completed on bringing in descriptions for all of the archives at the London Metropolitan Archives, the biggest local authority in the country, and the partnership now has more than 120 members, most recently including the National Maritime Museum, Kew Gardens and the British Postal Museum. For more information relating to any of these projects, please contact King’s College London Archives: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/library/archivespec/contact.aspx.

Robert Hall
Director of Library Services & Employability

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