Member interview with Emily Powell

 

Emily Powell is the Knowledge Platform Manager at the Government Consulting Hub, a part of the Cabinet Office. Previously, she was a librarian at the College of Policing and MoD in a variety of roles, more recently focusing on systems and discovery. Personally passionate about Open Government and Open Access, she is slowly working through her KIM Chartership. In her free time Emily plays PC games, gardens and spoils her Springador. 

Could you tell us about your background and how you became involved in the information profession? 

I am one of the few people I know who had only even wanted to be a civil service / government librarian! My interest in government and politics came first and when I decided I wanted to enter the information profession it seemed natural to combine the two things. My first library job was volunteering in and then running the JV ‘Library’ in Keele University’s politics department. It was a room with books in it so calling it a “library” was definitely a stretch. I then worked at a couple of University Libraries while qualifying and got my first professional post in 2009 with the Mod Army Libraries. 

 

Where have you worked and in what sorts of roles? 

I have moved Departments and Agencies several times and I have now moved from librarianship into a fully knowledge management role. This has been because of short contracts, pay restraint and the need to move for promotional opportunities, but it has also been quite positive in that I have experienced some contextually quite different roles. 

At the Army Libraries I was in my first role for six months and was essentially there to support the downsizing and move of the Service Central Library. I then moved into a cataloguing and systems support role and discovered my interest in systems. The Army Libraries were my first experience of the difficulties of running a service and navigating security restrictions and technology limitations, which are sometimes hard to explain to colleagues in university libraries! There also used to a be a CILIP Defence Libraries Group which I was a part of. 

I worked for the MoD again a few years later, running the Royal School of Military Survey Library. It was great running and organising my own library, and I got involved in things I never expected to, like Dissertation supervision and teaching how to write literature reviews.  

Between and after these roles I worked for the National Policing Improvement Agency / College of Policing. In my first post I undertook systematic searching in support of Rapid Evidence Assessments for the Researchers. This is quite interesting work and will make you dream in search strings. In my more recent post at the College I was in a split knowledge / library role where I managed the running of the library management system and discovery system and also supported the College’s work on police knowledge sharing in Knowledge Hub.  

Currently I am working fully in KM at the Cabinet Office in the Government Consulting Hub (GCH). I run the Knowledge Exchange platform for cross-government sharing of consultancy outputs. We are working with the CO Interoperability Team to see if we can streamline and simplify knowledge sharing across the Civil Service through behaviour change and interoperable technology, or potentially a single cross-government knowledge sharing platform.  

 

What are you mostly excited about in our profession? Are there any challenges or success stories you would like to share with us? 

I am super excited about the possibility that I could be a key cog in a project to bring together knowledge management across government and eliminate a lot of the silo-ing that goes on. There are so many challenging elements to this: cultural change, financing something across-government, quality control, having one metadata standard. We may not achieve everything but it is great that this is now being seen as a priority by central government. 

In my role, trying to capture consultancy and advisory outputs that exist across government is an immensely challenging task for our team, as we do not know what exists currently or where it might live, so putting this out there as a bit of a “please” to other KM professionals who might want to be champions for us! 

And, because I am still a little bit a librarian, Open Access. If you work in a library with poor e-access and not with the budget of a university library you know it is a patchy mess that does not really work for anyone. I am still excited that one day it might result in a much better system but currently it is just exasperating.  

 

What advice would you give to someone starting their career as a librarian/information professional? 

If you want to go into a government type role, be incredibly flexible. Government KIM covers data protection, information management, knowledge management, libraries and other areas. It is good to keep your ear out for the key IM area of the day and take any training you can get, even if it does not appeal. If you do not want to work in London, you will likely have to move around a bit in terms of departments and locations. Also, when searching for jobs, do not assume anyone indexes them properly or even knows they are looking for a KIM professional. My current role was part of a bulk advert and was not considered to be KIM by the recruiters. 

 

What are your (personal/professional) plans and expectations for the future? 

I am working through my KM chartership, although that is risky to mention here as it may still be true in five years’ time based on my Chartership track record! I am part of the GKIM London panel at CS live, talking about information overload in three panel sessions on the 5th of July which should be a fun if intense experience. 

Otherwise I intend to enjoy the challenges of my current role and see whether we can achieve a single government window on knowledge.