Head of Contemporary British and Irish Publications

Location: St Pancras
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full time (36 hours)
Grade: SB4
Salary: £52,724 per annum

About the role
This is an exciting opportunity to lead an innovative and creative curatorial team responsible for the development of and engagement with 21st century publications from the UK and Ireland in digital and print form.

Contemporary British and Irish Publications includes published books and journals, zines, comics, and artists’ books as well as born digital mapping and the UK Web Archive.

In this role, you will manage the team of eight curatorial staff and two collaborative PhD students. You will take responsibility for the strategic direction of the Contemporary British and Irish Publications team, leading on collection development, research projects and public engagement.

A key focus of this role is on development of policy for UK legal deposit, and you will work closely with teams in collection management, digital preservation and digital scholarship. Legal deposit forms a core part of the Library’s Knowledge Matters strategy, in particular for our purpose of custodianship. You will also work with colleagues at the five other legal deposit libraries for the UK.

You will have good employment experience at academic or research libraries, and a demonstrable research interest that is relevant to Contemporary British and Irish Publications. Good communication and engagement skills are essential. You will also have proven leadership and people management skills, including the ability to direct, motivate and develop a team of professional staff. As this role includes management of digital collections including the UK Web Archive, you should be able to demonstrate interest and experience of use and research methods relevant to digital content.

About us
We are the national library of the UK and we are here for everyone. Our shelves hold over 170 million items – a living collection that gets bigger every day. Although our roots extend back centuries, we aim to collect everything published in the UK today, tomorrow and far into the future. Our trusted experts care for this collection and open it up for everyone to spark new discoveries, ideas and to help people do incredible things.

What we can offer you
- A competitive salary.
- A fantastic pension scheme with minimum employer contributions of 28.97% (this may be higher dependent on grade).
- Flexible working hours, with the ability to take up to 5 days flexi leave in a 3-month period.
- 25 days holiday.
- Full details of employee benefits can be found on our Careers: Benefits

Closing date: 29 June 2025
Prospective interview date: 16 July 2025

Museum Website: https://ce0752li.webitrent.com/ce0752li_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC179GF.open?WVID=5071482BMD