People:

Bev Foster

I joined Emerald on a temporary basis back in the 90s and became permanent on the 24th April 1991. My role was Administration Assistant and I was based at our warehouse in Eccleshill, Bradford. Emerald, known as MCB University Press back then, had its own warehouse that stored all of our journals and leaflets for promotional campaigns. Everything was distributed from the warehouse to all our customers worldwide; we also had a team of Distribution Executives who "stuffed" the envelopes with either promotional campaigns or the journals themselves. Back then we sent out hundreds of thousands of direct mail campaigns worldwide on an individual journal level.

My current role is Sales Development Manager working with the Asia Pacific remit within the Commercial Operations team. For the past 17 years I have worked with customers and colleagues across the Asia Pacific remit, so I do feel that I have strength in this region. My current role as Sales Development Manager allows me to work closely with colleagues to ensure that they are fully trained on all our products, services, processes and internal systems.

When I joined Emerald, I kept logs of stock control for all our journals on small pieces of paper and dealt with the Royal Mail on a daily basis for all our postal requirements. I liaised with the Marketing team at HQ to ensure their campaigns were sent out on time, I was responsible for sending out individual sample copies of our journals to customers worldwide, and logged any returns. I also kept records of employees holidays, sickness and hours.

Now, as part of the small group of three Sales Development Managers, we are responsible for liaising with lots of areas of the business to help create training packs and toolkits for all of our products, services, processes and internal systems. We create presentations and cheat sheets for our systems and processes and these are all then used to train our sales teams and others team members worldwide. Part of our role is to travel to our designated locations and ensure that the teams are fully trained on the above which will allow the teams to make more sales.

When I joined, I think there were around 70 employees of which the majority were women; now the company has grown massively, and we have a huge worldwide presence.

A couple of memories that stand out for me are:

The leech – 2014 – team building in Malaysia: Wan decided that we would go into the forest in Malaysia as part of the team building activities. We had to swing through trees, jump into very small natural pools from a huge height and walk miles! When we got back to the dormers, I went for a shower, and saw a massive leech clung onto my side. I started screaming out and shouting for help as I thought it was going to drink all my blood. I started to feel a little faint; Sarjit came to my rescue and she managed to get the leech off using some special spray. It was tiny once it deflated…moral of the story: always tuck your vest in when swimming in strange waters and make sure that your colleagues are ready for a shock of their lives whey they hear screaming from the showers – poor Sarjit!

First trip to Taiwan: the elephant rescue centre – 2001 – In a taxi in Taiwan, I was sitting next to our sales agent as we did not have a presence at that time. She was explaining to me about all the buildings in central Taipei. She then said, "You see that building, Bev?" I said, "yes" She said "that is Elephant rescue" I thought.. wow… in central Taipei! I started chirping on about "are there lots of roaming elephants around here?" I was looking up at the building that had maybe 30 plus floors thinking how on earth do they get them in there – she then said, "Bev, what do you think I said?" Very embarrassed guessing I’d misheard, I said "urm, I am not sure." She said, "that is my Elementary School, Bev." Then the taxi went quiet! …

Sibu Zondi

I have been with Emerald for 7 years now, since 2010.

My role is Regional Manager for the Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) region.

I used to work from home when I first started in 2010. My day started at 8am in the office and then I was the only local Emerald representative looking after the whole of SSA region. I dealt with sales, invoicing and payments, access issues, Bingley meetings via WebEx and customer meetings in between. I normally used both RUBI and SRM a lot for information. Being the sole representative I relied a lot on The Update newsletter for information.

There are normal two situations to my job now, it is always dependent on whether I am travelling for business or not. If I am in the office my day starts just after 7am with e-mails, checking sales performance and other reports on RUBI, checking reporting on SRM, attending to administration work and preparing ahead for meetings ahead during the day. Most of the meetings start from 10am and on average I could have 3 internal meetings including Bingley. In between I will engage with customers regarding new business and addressing outstanding matters for existing customers. My day normally finishes at 7pm.

The biggest change since I joined Emerald is the people. When I started it was different types of people with many years in the business but in the past 3 years a lot has changed in this area. I have been able to adapt though given the pace of change across the business.

The visit to South Africa by Dr Keith Howard in 2012 is a memory that will always stand out. During his one week visit, we hosted a joint seminar together with the University of Pretoria and visited our key business stakeholders (academic institutions, government and public sector). This was also the time when subject collections were being introduced in the market and it happened that I was still involved with SANLiC's consortium renewal discussions in South African. Keith also sat in one of the consortium meetings during his one week stay in the country.

Paul Morrell, Chris Ball and Alyson Wilkinson

Paul Morrell, Electronic Production Manager, and Chris Ball, Production and Despatch Manager have worked at Emerald for 35 years. Alyson Wilkinson, Deputy Production & Despatch Manager, retired in 2016 after working at Emerald for 36 years.

Paul:

We were all originally employed as Typesetters in 1980-81. When thinking about a typical day back then, firstly there were no personal computers, mobile phones or internet.

A typesetter literally "typed" everything that was published. We received manuscripts that had been "marked up" by a copy editor. We'd then typeset these on a Compugraphic typesetting machine. No visuals or layouts were seen on the screen, just test and tags. Figures, line drawings and photographs were created separately.

For a lot of the years we've worked, there was no such thing as technology. It was all very basic – printing things out, cutting things up, sticking them down, then sending them to the printers. The equipment we first started on is now on display in the Leeds Industrial Museum!

Alyson:

I think we were the nearest to computers before they existed with the typesetting machines we used. The other guys didn’t have anything like that, everything was paper, posting letter and memos and stuff. If you think about how long it took to create an article, if it included tables and figures as well, and maths (because we had a separate thing where you had to key in all of your maths, which took forever) well I can’t imagine how much time you’d save these days, it’d take a tenth of the time or something! It would probably take you the best part of a day to key in a whole article if it included figures and tables and maths.

Chris:

A big revelation for us, I can't remember at what point, was receiving 3.5" floppy disks from the authors, rather than us having to key everything in. Before that, we’d get hard copy manuscripts that had been typed on a typewriter and we had to redo it all, it was all codes and words.

Alyson:

That really was fabulous. I always remember if you got it on a disk you just put it in there and you’ve got all your words and spaces on the screen, you don’t have to type it all in, you just have to put the commands in. That was brilliant! It was like "this job’s got 3 disks with it! Brilliant!"

Chris:

I also worked on the project which eventually became our Literati Awards. Eileen Breen and I created a card index system for all of our author details, and from that we created a database. It was a Director at the time, Gordon Wills' idea to turn this into an awards ceremony for the authors and editors.

We eventually moved onto Apple Macs for typesetting, and it was around that time that everyone else began to get PCs.

Paul:

In around '94 or '95 people started to know about what the internet was. Then the decision was made that Emerald’s future was to put our content on the internet. From 1996 onwards we had our content on our Emerald Insight platform.

Alyson:

Everything is electronic now, with the internet, FTP sites, XML. It’s all a lot faster, and all digital.

Paul:

A typical day now in comparison is 99% computer based. Everything is electronic. That's just how it's evolved. Manuscripts are sent to external typesetters and finished electronic files are delivered to be either sent to the printers or published on Emerald Insight. 35 years ago we published approximately 20 journal titles with an average of 4 issues per title. Now we publish over 250 journal titles, approximately 150 books plus case studies and conference proceedings.

The most startling difference is that back in 1980 we had a handful of employees and about 6 Directors on site at Keighley Road. Now we have over 350 employees worldwide and we’re working in a digital age.

The way the company has evolved is the biggest change. We've gone from two old shops on Toller Lane to Howard House where everything's suited to the modern age.

Chris:

I remember when we were at Keighley Road and used to work shifts, there was accommodation upstairs for the Directors or anybody who needed to stay. You could be working away and one of them would come down in their dressing gown for their breakfast! I’d be thinking "I’m not making your breakfast – I’m busy!"

Paul:

The other major change has been technology. The internet has brought the world in so you can talk to people, have conference calls with India and Australia and you're fine, before you just didn’t. It was difficult to even get through on the telephone.

Once we had computers here, if we needed to share information from one person to another we put it on floppy disks, and that was revolutionary. They were 1.3 megabyte floppy disks and you could take them with you. Now you can get numerous gigabytes on your mobile phone and memory sticks!

Nafisah Shah

My first day with Emerald was on 17th Feb 1997 – 19 years ago.

My role is Accounts and Admin Executive for Malaysia office. My role is to ensure that all expenses/reimbursements for Kuala Lumpur (KL) employees are processed in a timely manner. I also maintain accurate reports and records of financial activity for the KL office and also to ensure smooth support for the day-to-day KL office management.

My typical work day when I started was about administrative work, keeping the petty cash and prepare the expense report and John Foster report using Microsoft Excel. The report was send to UK via fax machine. The only communication at that time was by air mail and telephone calls.

My typical work day now is more on financial and accounting activity. Every expenses/invoice were recorded into a system called Microsoft Dynamic GP. Every query can be sent to overseas colleague via e-mail, IP phone and Jabber and I get the reply straight away. Communication between overseas colleagues can be made easily.

The biggest changes since I started are the company name changing from MCB University Press to Emerald Group Publishing Limited. The organization has expanded its business and has the regional offices and representatives worldwide.

My fondest memory is having the opportunity to meet the MCB University Press shareholders Gordon Wills, Barry Pettman and Keith Howard when they came and visit to Malaysia office.

Richard Whitfield

Senior Publisher

I have worked for Emerald for 20 years and am now a Senior Publisher.

When I joined Emerald I was a Sub-Editor on the evening shift. I started at 4pm and finished at midnight (really). We did very significant sub-editing. There were three stages 1st, 2nd and 3rd proof. 2nd proof was the most intensive work. We used to contact authors by letter or fax and keep carbon copies of our communications in with the article.

There was a large sub-editing department. Articles came in as hard copy or floppy disk and much of the sub-editing work involved getting rid of typos caused in scanning etc. I remember thinking that the Emerald (MCB) world then revolved around the manuscripts we were working on in Bingley. I soon came to realize that this was only one element of what was even then a very international and diverse company.

My work now is much more strategic and cross-functional. It is very data driven in terms of citation activity and how competitors are operating. The Publisher role is very focused on interpersonal skills in terms of managing external (and internal) relationships.

When I became a Publisher (about 18 months after joining) I realised how much of what really mattered about the company was taking place all around the world (that was the case even 20 plus years ago). The biggest change since I started is the introduction of the database. I doubt the company would exist if that hadn’t happened. It meant we suddenly had a fairly priced product which led to good dissemination. We had previously had very high priced journals with very low dissemination.

Change has always been a constant at Emerald. We have had a lot of it in publishing particularly over the last four years or so, but it has been part of my working life for the last two decades.

I remember on Wednesday evenings we always got fish and chips in for the entire night shift and ate them in Mrs Robinson's cottage. We really had a part of our building that was Mrs Robinson's cottage. We obviously bought it from Mrs Robinson!

I remember my first overseas conference. I was asked at short notice to stand in for my Head of Department and suddenly finding myself in Singapore. I had one particular moment when I thought "how on earth did I suddenly wind up here?" It was the first time I’d been to the Far East and I’d been working in FE before Emerald so the furthest I got to was Halifax!

I remember Wednesday football was an absolutely set part of the weekly routine and John Peters and Martin Fojt – both Directors – were keen players, so there was no quitting until somebody won!

Alison Hawker

Editorial Manager

I have worked for Emerald for 24 years, but it will be 25 next year as I joined on the year of their Silver Anniversary.

My role is Editorial Manager. I remember having to work in a portacabin when I joined as the offices at Toller Lane couldn’t accommodate us all and we had to go into the main building to photocopy anything or talk to anyone! It was very quiet in there, a bit like a library, as we were all concentrating on the job in hand.

I started as a sub-editor at Emerald and in those days I didn’t have a computer and everything in that role was done on paper, with extensive use of a red pen! I would mark up papers for the typesetter, giving them instructions on how to set a paper, including any amends to the text, and what point size and leading to set them in. I would also make sure that any information in the paper an author had supplied was correct as far as possible. These would then be set by the typesetter, but in those days they didn’t go into a template and this only happened after a few proofs had been done. They would then go through four sets of proofs, which were all done on different coloured paper, so we knew what stage they were at. Authors were also sent proofs, but at that time we didn’t use e-mail either so these were sent out by snail mail or sometimes fax, as were queries, and often took a long time to come back to us. As you can appreciate things sometimes took a long time, but we did have fewer journals. We also didn’t have books in those days.

I now work in Editorial and still check the papers sent in by authors, but only mainly for permissions and copyright. Nowadays everything is much quicker and more slick. I work on a computer everyday using lots of different programs. I can use these to contact the authors and Editors and often receive almost instant answers to queries. I only get to see one set of proofs in my editorial role and the time to publication is much shorter.

Since I started, the move to computerization and "right first time" has improved things a lot. It places much more onus on the author to get things to us in the correct format and we no longer have to check the information in the text to make sure it is correct because of this. This has improved time to publication and also author satisfaction.

I remember the old offices at Toller Lane and sometimes miss them. They were very cramped and a bit random in layout as they were originally houses, but the working atmosphere was more intimate and everyone knew one another.

Debapriya Mukherjee

Senior Business Manager, India Office

I have worked for Emerald for 10 years. I am a Senior Business Manager, responsible for business from North India, North-East India and Bangladesh.

I started my career in Emerald on 5th February 2007 in New Delhi office, which was then a very small office which can accommodate only two or three people. I still remember I was sharing the same workstation with my then Country Manager as the place is very congested.

On my first day I called up my contacts from my region (then only Eastern Part of India) to just inform them that I joined Emerald and share the product and services with them via telephone, and accordingly fixed my appointments. The librarian community knows about Emerald Group Publishing Limited, but when I contacted some faculty members some of them were not known to Emerald. Since SRM and Citrix was introduced later hence we used to work on VPN services to just check the mails.

At present the work is very easy with lots of reports on usage, products, customer history all are available into RUBI, which one can access at any point of time as per the requirement, this help us to pitch our products and services. Like turnaway reports are used for account development activity, usage reports are used to develop and low usage customer to high usage and so on.

The biggest change since I joined Emerald would be the upgrading of our RUBI systems and of course the transition to Atypon for hosting our content.

Working in Emerald has given me a chance to work with very good colleagues and seniors, and department heads like our former Sales Director Bill Rusell, Chris Keenan, Vicky Williams, Peter Shelley and Shariq Mumtaz.

In those days we used to name our eJjournals number variants called "Emerald Management Xtra" and with lots of promotional activity and appointments/visits lots of breakthrough happened for new customers. I still remember one of my customers – after placing an order – made the cheque payable in the name of "Emerald Management Xtra" and payable to the UK, which was later changed after convincing them that Emerald Management Xtra was a product name not a company! This shows the strong branding of our products.

Helen Trudgill

Customer Operations Executive

I have worked for Emerald for 20 years, eventually becoming Customer Operations Executive.

We worked on a system called GEMS when I first joined MCB University Press at Toller Lane. A typical day in the "busy season/renewal season" was to bank our cheques in the morning. Customers and agents sent payments by cheque along with orders. We had so many to bank each day that if you had finished yours you would ask if anyone needed help to bank theirs. This was very much "team work" as all banking had to be done by lunchtime (the banking would then be taken to the bank later that day).

The rest of the day was spent processing all the orders, and working on daily tasks such as claims, price quotes, change of addresses, and general enquiries. Much communication was by fax in the 1990s. The majority of the journal titles were paper only and only a handful of databases.

Around 1996/1997 CD-ROMs were introduced. Once a subscription had been paid, the customer would be sent a code number to access the CD-ROM. The code requests were received and sent by fax.

We had a regional office in Malaysia and Japan and I believe Mr Hara worked from home. Each executive had their own group of titles i.e. strategy and training, engineering etc, and dealt with customers all over the world who subscribed to the titles.There have been so many changes, too many to mention as you would expect over 20 years, including the name change to Emerald and also location to Bingley.

We have now changed systems to SRM and GP finance systems. The banking is mainly by BACS transfer. Customers began to join consortias so spreadsheets were produced to help log customers, pricing etc. The orders are so much more complex now which at times results in the legal team to be involved with sales agreements.

The number of individual titles which we now publish has increased so much and now there are so many different databases, collections, eBooks etc. We now have regional offices all over the world.

The biggest changes since I started are technology and watching the organization grow. When I started work at MCB University Press there were approximately 86 people who worked there and the workplace was two houses: no.60 and no.62 Toller Lane.

One memory I can share is that we had two goldfish called "the boys" which were in a fish tank on my desk at no. 62 Toller Lane. Another memory was the tuck shop we had when we worked in no.60 Toller Lane. Lesley and I ran a tuck shop for many years and all proceeds went to Air Ambulance, cat rescue at Allerton and the rabbit sanctuary at Heaton. This was very popular.

Katy Snell

Head of HR: Talent & Organizational Development

I have worked for Emerald for 13 years and my role is Head of HR: Talent & Organizational Development.

I joined as a HR Officer where my responsibilities included providing advice, guidance and support to both managers and employees on recruitment, benefits administration, payroll and maintaining employee records.

The company has doubled in size since I joined, and although we have always had people based overseas, the established global presence we have today provides me with an exciting and constantly evolving role, dealing the challenges of being a truly global business

One of my biggest memories is the move from Toller Lane to Howard House – the opportunity to be part of the project team for the relocation, the excitement and buzz of the actual move, and the memory of Nicola Craven and I cleaning desks and filling goody bags until 10pm the night before our grand opening!

Mike Fang

Regional Manager, China Office

It is hard to recall the day 11 years ago, however I still remember how I visited 7 customers in one day. I departed at 7:30am, usually from a hotel, waiting for the first librarian in front of the library. After talking to several people in the first library for an hour and a half, I got to the second customer spending a similar amount of time with them. By midday the third customer was met for lunch and usually we knew each other already. After lunch, the 4th and 5th customer were met in the afternoon before 6pm. Then finally, dinner was booked with the 7th customer in the evening. With each customer, we usually needed to speak to more than two people and that was the day I exhausted all my words!

I am the manager for one of the biggest regions of Emerald. I still start at 7am on e-mails and arrive in the office at 9:30am, with most of my time spent forming the procedures of different departments. Formal meetings are seldom, instead e-mails and occasional catch- ups are frequently used in the communication with all colleagues. Colleagues are the most important customers of mine.

The biggest change since I started is that the company has become much bigger. It is much harder to know most of the people.

I have a lot of great memories. One particular memory was the sales conferences between 2005 and 2007. Those sales conferences were mainly presented by each Business Manager to almost all the employees of Emerald. It was a funny time, always with stories and jokes from the people who worked from different regions and cultures.

Paul Harrison

Business Insight Manager

I have worked for Emerald for 18 years. My current role is Business Insight Manager where my team look after the reporting delivered via the "Rubi" platform. However, I have had a number of roles whilst working at Emerald. For example, I started as a Customer Support Executive.

As I mentioned above, I first started in February 1998 as a Customer Support Executive. A typical day would consist mostly of answering customer queries about our websites and the content we delivered via CD-ROMs (remember those?), ensuring that they could access the content they subscribed to and generally trying to keep the customer happy.

Boy things have changed now! Customer service is still a large part of my role, but now a typical customer is internal not external. A typical day starts with our daily scrum where we discuss the tasks the team are currently working on, how we are progressing them and any ideas for improvements or how to overcome challenges we face. I have a second scrum an hour later for the Data Strategy Group. Then, now that I am feeling agile, I spend the rest of the day in meetings discussing how BI might help progress a particular project or bring insight to a particular decision that needs to be made, or working on actually producing that insight using the SAP BusinessObjects toolset (referred to as Rubi within the businessness).

The biggest challenge I have faced in my current role is without doubt data governance. The business has grown organically from a relatively small business employing around 100 people, pretty much all based in Bradford, when I first joined to the global large business we are today. As we have grown we have added new systems or replaced legacy ones without an overarching data strategy to support integrations, data security and reporting requirements. We therefore face a number of challenges within that area. However, the Data Strategy Group was launched earlier this year to address these issues and I am confident we have the right people in place to tackle the issues and ensure good data governance moving forwards.

I have lots of happy memories. If I wasn’t happy here, I would have stayed for 18 years. Emerald is a great place to work. For me though, no one memory stands out. It is the people that make Emerald such a great place to work rather than individual events.

Sylvia Hall

Personal Assistant to Keith Howard

I have worked for Emerald for 22 years. My role is Personal Assistant to Keith Howard.

I was originally employed as PA to John Foster, Finance Director. My work mainly involved typing of financial matters. I also did the salaries. Keith at that time was Editor of IJOPM and I used to do work for him relating to this journal.

Now I only work part-time. I work solely for Keith, mainly dealing with his personal correspondence etc. I am also Secretary of the Emerald Foundation. I would say the biggest change to Emerald was when we re-branded (from MCB University Press to Emerald) and also entered the electronic era.

I love working at Emerald and have many happy memories. One of these is the visit of the Duke of Kent to Emerald.

Samir El Hefnawy

Business Manager, MENA region

I have been with Emerald Since 2011. I am The Country Manager (Business Manager) for GCC region within MENA team, covering Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.

As well as my time in the office, I work out in the field a lot visiting customers, giving presentations and running workshops, and representing Emerald at conferences. My typical working day has not changed a great deal compared to when I started here, other than we have more focus on strategic activities now.

The biggest changes I have seen in my time here are the mix of customers and sectors, and the increased number of authors and usage from our region. Our team has also grown – we are 6 members, when I joined we were only 4.

I have so many stand-out memories from my time here, but I will pick just this one: in 2013 I ran our Guide to Getting Published workshop with The Public Authority of Applied Education & Training in Kuwait (PAAET) with over 90 attendees. It was my first time presenting to such a large audience for Emerald. I received great feedback, and as a result they also signed up for our Research & Publishing Pathways workshop. This showed me how we can help and improve the ecosystem with the help of these workshops.

Jordi Caralt

Regional Manager & Vice President – Australasia

I started working for Emerald in July 2004. My role is Director of the subsidiary company in Australasia and Regional Manager of Team Australasia (from 2015); previous positions at the company include Regional Manager of Team MENA (2013-2014), based in Dubai, and Business Manager for Southern Europe (2004-2012), based first in Bradford and later in Bingley (after the company moving offices).

My typical working day wasn’t too different from now, except that smartphones did not exist, and Business Managers did not have laptops (I remember that in my first trips to Athens, Madrid and Milan, for example, after the visits to institutions I used to go to an Internet café near my hotel to read and answer e-mails! Nowadays that would be unthinkable!)

I now have management of a team of 5 people (including me), providing support and guidance to everyone; setting strategic direction for the company in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific islands. The biggest changes since I started are the regional offices; I believe that in 2004, outside the head office then in Bradford, we only had the office in Kuala Lumpur.

Although I could share lots of memories, I’ve chosen this one: in November 2013 I had to fly from Dubai to Riyadh for the day to literally "get a cheque in hand" from the Saudi Digital Library consortium. Although they had already committed to the purchase of the Emerald Backfiles months before, they said to us that before paying they wanted me to fly to Saudi Arabia and present which journals/coverage were included in the database! After the presentation they gave me the cheque.

Ania Kaminska

Test Manager

I have worked for Emerald for 24 years, and I too am celebrating my 50th this year!

My role is Test Manager in our Business Change Management department. I initially started on a 12 month maternity cover which then got extended for three months, and now I’ve been here 24 years!

When I first started, I worked in the marketing database unit, managing and backing up the database, printing off prospecting lists and labels, and removing people who no longer wished to receive promotional mail. We would also buy in data lists which we then manually typed into the database. For me, this was a strange job to be in as I wasn’t actually technical, and at that time they were beginning to introduce computers.

If you wanted to send a message to anyone back then you had to write a memo which you printed out and put in their pigeon holes or on their desks. It would sometimes be 23 people you had to give the memo to! If you wanted to set up a meeting, you had to go to reception where they had a meeting book where you booked the time. But of course you didn’t know if everyone could actually make it to the meeting, so you would also send out a memo telling people to come to it.

A couple of years after that the internet was introduced and we had a new department called the Electronic Publishing Initiative so we were involved in starting up the very first website which was only one or two pages, and then I was involved with the company being set up with e-mail too.

I continued working closely with the website from then on, eventually managing the front end of the site. We were building the pages and making updates. Our team was then moved into I.T. I later moved into a Business Analysis role, so I was still involved in website changes. Because I have always been heavily involved with the evolving technology, it doesn’t feel like such a dramatic change in the way we work.

One of the main reasons I’ve stayed with Emerald so long is because the company has evolved so much over the years. Every few years we’ve tended to have a reorganization and created new departments in order to evolve.

A stand out memory for me is the employees party we had in the office when we relaunched as Emerald. We had lots of food and plenty of drinks and everyone had a great time. I’m sure Barry, one of the Directors, was doing cartwheels at one point too around the "E" that had been cut into the grass on the front lawn!

Caroline Airey

Business Analyst

I have worked for Emerald for 22 years. My role is Business Analyst in our Business Change Management department.

My first role was in customer retention looking after renewals, in the Customer Development Professionals Department.

Everything was direct mail in those days, there was no computer like we have now, but we had a customer database of all the contacts and addresses, which we pulled data from for our marketing campaigns. We would send out letters before a customer’s subscription was due to be renewed in December. So we would start in around June and then send monthly reminders up until then. If a customer renewed, there was no automated way to pull them off the list, so had to create a list of those who had renewed and then manually pull them out of the next round of letter that were due to be sent out.

Because at that time we didn’t have a printer that could print double-sided, when we did the letters we tried as much as we possibly could to fit the text onto one page. If we couldn’t then we had to spend hours collating paper – making a pile that had one page of headed paper followed by a blank page. This was a very tedious task that had to be done manually. If you fed it into the printer and you’d done it wrong it would mess up the whole job and you’d have to start again! We had a similar problem printing address labels – they all had to be lined up perfectly and if one was slightly out of place it ruined the whole lot and you’d have to start again!

We would print all of the letters and send them to our mail resource office in Eccleshill where they’d be stuffed into envelopes and mailed out. The amount of paper that we sent out in those days was enormous! Thousands and thousands of letters a year. Everything was done by letter; none of it was by telephone. It stayed like that for a number of years until we started to expand the sales team. Also, at that point in time it was all focused on journals – it was before we had electronic content. Each member of the team was responsible for their own allocation of journals, and they did all of the renewal letters for those and reported back on the progress in publishing meetings.

I moved from Customer Retention when we first started our e-mail database and e-mail marketing. We built the database which covered interest area lists, and introduced our Table of Contents (ToC) alerts service which we were one of the first publishers to do.

Signing up for ToC alerts was initially a manual job – people would sign up on the website and we would then import those details into our e-mail database, and so when a new issue was published online we would manually go into the database to pull off a list of those people, create a message and do a mail merge to send it out. This is now standard on the platform and automated which shows how the technology has evolved.

I then moved in to the Internet Service Development team which looked after enhancing our website, and all its various different versions we’ve had during my time here, from the MCB website to our Emerald Insight on Atypon we have now. It’s been realty interesting to be on the team working at the forefront with the advances in technology we’ve had over the years. I remember when we first started publishing onto CD-ROMs, and at first a lot of our customers didn’t like it. We had librarians saying "what is this, why would we want it? We don’t know how to catalogue this, can we just have the print version instead with a discount?" and those type of questions. But when we moved to publishing online, there wasn’t as much resistance as the customers had become used to the CD-ROMs so it wasn’t such a great leap, plus they could see the value in it so we had their buy in from an earlier stage.

We probably have more meetings these days because they’re a lot easier to set up. Also, in those days when the company was a lot smaller you would just go over to people’s desks to ask a question rather than set up a meeting. We would use the phone a lot more than we do today too, as we didn’t have e-mail. The biggest meetings I remember were the acquisition meetings for new titles, which needed someone from every department.

My work has always involved a great deal of change as we kept up with advances in technology over the years and now we’re going through another major change as we move to the agile way of working.

My biggest stand out memory is our official relaunch party when we rebranded as Emerald which took part at the IFLA conference in Boston, USA. I was there as we’d just redeveloped the librarian pages on our website, called Library Link at the time, and I delivered a presentation to a group of librarians about the changes with a round table discussion. The relaunch party took place in a conference room at the aquarium, and the event included a sea lion show, and a fantastic performance from a group of child Irish Dancers – it seems like a very random selection of entertainment looking back now, which surely must have puzzled a lot of the librarians, but it was a great party and we all enjoyed ourselves!

Mike Hill

I joined Research Media Ltd almost five years ago, before its acquisition by Emerald Group in 2013.

I started as a junior designer, designing research articles for the publication International Innovation, our only product at that point. As the success of the publication grew, so did the company. My role now is senior designer, and I work on many different projects as our offerings have diversified, including project management, animation, layout and production of print products, illustration and brand development.

I have worked with Emerald on many projects including several animations, bespoke illustrations for the collateral redesigns and the 50th anniversary book. Working on such projects has given me an immense amount of experience in project management and liaising with third-parties.

My experience with Emerald has given me the opportunity to broaden my skill set and explore new design techniques because of the close working relationship that has been established.

Barrie Robertson

I joined Research Media, part of the Emerald Group, a little over two years ago.

Today I’m an Account Manager, helping academic and research-based organizations to realize their communication objectives by leveraging our professional creative services. Around the world academia is slowly switching on to the fact that they need to support their scholarly output with attractive and engaging materials that make their work accessible to a broader audience. It’s another aspect to an exciting period of change in the industry, spearheaded by the rise of open access, as people challenge the traditional models of how best to share research findings.

I originally started as the Data and Campaigns Executive, supporting the Sales team to acquire clients for International Innovation. Within a short space of time I’d streamlined many of our antiquated processes and added an amount of rigour to our data governance practices. Having identified we were under utilising our Salesforce CRM system I began to tackle its setup and use to better support the sales team and transitioned to a new role of Sales Operations Manager.

As Research Media reshaped to being the media agency we are today, I moved into the customer-facing role of Account Manager, having performed in such a role previously, although I retain many of the Sales Ops responsibilities.

Working on the systems side has required plenty of cross-group collaboration, probably more so than any other roles at Research Media, and as I constantly challenge to deliver improvements I’ve no doubt caused a number of headaches for the Business Intelligence, Business Change and Technology teams in my relatively short time with Emerald! Hopefully our colleagues at GoodPractice have found me a little more helpful, they too use the Salesforce CRM and I linked up with them shortly after they joined the group in order that we all benefit from shared working knowledge of the system.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to participate in the Emerald Group ASPIRE programme, through which I’ve formed great relationships across the group and created some fun memories. Out on a team building day, in one exercise we failed Ben Davies who consequently was dragged chest deep through a particularly cold lake in early March! Ben was a top sport about it, though through crossed wires some management back at the office believed this to be an unsavoury act and there was a confused dialogue between all involved to explain it wasn’t intentional! Though I still maintain it was good training for his triathlons!

Justin Anderson

I have worked for GoodPractice for 4 and a half years.

My role is Senior Content Editor.

When I joined the company, my role was mainly about writing and editing content for the GoodPractice toolkit. But the evolution of the company and our core product has seen me go from a predominantly text-based job to working with images, filming and editing videos, developing infographics, producing animations, and managing bespoke projects for clients.

Beyond that, our collaborative culture has given me the chance to get involved with every other department. I get to contribute to e-learning projects, be involved with the technical team in developing new software, and support the marketing, sales and executive teams.

This year, the GoodPractice podcast has been another exciting development, allowing me to get my teeth into an entirely new medium. The variety of work, collaborative culture, focus on work-life balance and great people make working at GoodPractice genuinely enjoyable and rewarding – which is probably why I’ve been here longer than I’ve ever worked anywhere else!

I have a lot of great memories from my time here, and it says a lot about the company that many of them are social! There was the filming trip to Kuala Lumpur, when our camera equipment showed up fifteen minutes before our first interview (!) and we hung around an extra day to visit the Malaysian Grand Prix. The company BBQ where we went on a treasure hunt involving donkeys, fairies and a suspicious peat bog also stands out.

But probably the most vivid and apt memory is from this year, when I got a last minute invite to go to the Herald Digital Awards. It was brilliant social occasion, and it saw the company recognised for the high quality of our work, products and client service. That night encapsulated everything that makes GoodPractice a great place to work.