Tom Roper

Medical (and sometime veterinary) librarian based in Sussex, UK

Born 1955 in London, brought up in Cambridge, where I went to the Perse School. Read economic history at University of Kent from 1974-78 and then stumbled into a job in a public library. Finding I liked it, I took the postgraduate librarianship course at what was then the Polytechnic of North London in 1983 and worked in North London public libraries till 1990. Then I changed direction, working for the British Council and Hawker Siddeley, before finding my way, not unnaturally for a doctor's son, into medical librarianship. I worked in London hospital libraries and at the Regional Library and Information Unit, before going to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1996. In January 2003 I became Information Resources Development Coordinator for the Brighton & Sussex Medical School, a job that ended recently.