Rachel Kirkwood
Collections Manager
Biography
Rachel leads the Collection Development and Management team, a large team engaged with many aspects of the Library’s modern collections both printed and digital, including the circulating collections and the Research Reserve.
She takes a strongly data-informed approach to providing and promoting the right material to the right people, and evaluating the use of collections, with a particular concern for facilitating access to collections which are research-ready for digital scholarship.
Rachel has a strong background in languages and area studies. She came to the University of Manchester Library from the bilingual environment of the Goethe-Institut in London, where she was deputy librarian and drove collection development of their English-language material. Prior to that she worked at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, cataloguing material in Finnish, German, and Hungarian.
Rachel is a Wellbeing Champion and core member of the Library Choir. Rachel is also a doctoral researcher working on an interdisciplinary PhD combining English, Theology and Cognitive Linguistics in a Digital Scholarship approach to historical Quaker Studies. Some early findings have been published as '“Stand Still in The Light”: What Conceptual Metaphor Research Can Tell Us about Quaker Theology' in Religions, an open access journal.