EPSO Librarian Competition AST/158/26: 243 Places Explained

The EU Is Recruiting Librarians at AST 3

EPSO published the notice of competition EPSO/AST/158/26 in the Official Journal on 6 October 2026 (C/2026/4963). It draws up reserve lists of assistants at grade AST 3 in three fields, and field 2 — Librarianship and information science — seeks 243 successful candidates. The two sister fields are data processing, analytics and statistics (423) and records and archives management (298). You may apply for one only.

Applications close on 11 November 2026 at 12.00 (midday), Brussels time, through the EPSO competition page. A scan of a valid identity card or passport is due by the same deadline; all other supporting documents by 11 March 2027 at 12.00.

EPSO markets the procedure as "Data management experts", which librarians can easily scroll past. Field 2 is librarianship in the full sense: acquisitions, cataloguing, lending, reference, electronic resources and controlled vocabularies.

Who Can Apply

Beyond the general conditions — EU citizenship with full rights, military obligations fulfilled, character requirements — you need one of two combinations on the closing date:

1. Post-secondary studies of at least two years in a listed area, attested by a diploma, plus three years of relevant professional experience gained after it. A diploma in a listed area obtained after a bachelor's in any field (postgraduate certificate, master's, PhD) also satisfies this, irrespective of its length.
2. Secondary education giving access to post-secondary studies, plus six years of relevant professional experience.

The listed areas are librarianship; information science or studies; information management; documentation science; information systems and computer science; media studies; and book and/or cultural heritage studies.

Experience is relevant only if it corresponds to the field 2 duties in Annex II — there is no wider list of accepted areas as there is for field 1. The general rules then pro-rate each job by the share of relevant tasks: above 75% the whole period counts, from over 50% to 75% it counts at 75%, from 25% to 50% at 50%, and below 25% it does not count. Describe your tasks in the vocabulary of Annex II.

The Tests — and the Only One That Ranks You

The notice sets the order of scoring: reasoning first, then the field MCQ for those who passed reasoning, then a ranking by MCQ score. EUFTE scripts are marked and eligibility checked only for the top of that ranking, in principle no more than 1.5 times the places — about 364 candidates for field 2 — unless ties at the cut-off push the number up.

Two details shape preparation. The field MCQ is in Language 2, the one where you only need B2. And it gives you 80 seconds per question: enough to recognise a definition, not enough to derive it.

The field-related MCQ guide and the EUFTE guide explain both formats; the reasoning gates start with verbal reasoning.

What the Field MCQ Draws On

The notice publishes twelve typical duties, not a syllabus. Read each duty as a pointer to the standards a library uses to perform it. The mapping below is our preparation guidance, built from the public texts.

Cataloguing, classification and authority control (duties 2 and 12)

IFLA Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (2016). Thirteen general principles. The convenience of the user is the most important; principles 2.2 to 2.13 are in no particular order, and if they conflict, interoperability is rated higher than the others.

ISBD, 2021 consolidated update. Description is organised in areas numbered 0 to 8. Area 0 is the content form and media type area; area 1 is title and statement of responsibility; area 8 is resource identifier and terms of availability. Each area after the first in a paragraph is preceded by point, space, dash, space.

IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM). The model that consolidated FRBR, FRAD and FRSAD. Its top entity is Res; beneath it sit Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item, Agent (with Person and Collective Agent), Nomen, Place and Time-span — eleven entities, LRM-E1 to LRM-E11.

MARC 21 and BIBFRAME. Know the tags that carry most questions — 245 for the title statement, 650 for a topical subject added entry. BIBFRAME 2.0, the Library of Congress's linked-data model, organises description into three core levels of abstraction: Work, Instance and Item.

Dublin Core. Fifteen elements in the original element set, standardised as ISO 15836-1:2017.

Controlled vocabularies. ANSI/NISO Z39.19 gives the thesaurus relationships: BT and NT (broader and narrower, an asymmetric reciprocal pair), RT (related term, symmetric: RT one way, RT the other), USE and UF (the entry term leads to the preferred one). In SKOS, the W3C model for publishing them, a resource has no more than one skos:prefLabel per language tag, and prefLabel, altLabel and hiddenLabel are pairwise disjoint. skos:broader is not transitive — that is what skos:broaderTransitive is for.

Systems and interoperability (duty 4)

The OAI-PMH protocol (version 2.0) has six requests — GetRecord, Identify, ListIdentifiers, ListMetadataFormats, ListRecords, ListSets — and unqualified Dublin Core is the mandatory metadata format. KBART (Knowledge Bases and Related Tools), the NISO recommended practice, governs the title lists that feed link resolvers and discovery systems.

Electronic resources, licences and copyright (duties 5 and 10)

Usage statistics. In COUNTER Release 5.1, Total_Item_Requests shows overall activity, while Unique_Item_Requests gives comparable usage across platforms by reducing the inflationary effect when an HTML full text displays automatically and the user then opens the PDF.

Lending. Directive 2006/115/EC lets Member States derogate from the exclusive public lending right provided that at least authors obtain a remuneration; Member States may exempt certain categories of establishments from paying it (Article 6).

Copies by libraries. Directive 2001/29/EC allows Member States to provide exceptions for specific acts of reproduction by publicly accessible libraries, educational establishments, museums or archives that are not for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage (Article 5(2)(c)), and for making works available on dedicated terminals on their premises for research or private study (Article 5(3)(n)).

Digital Single Market. Directive (EU) 2019/790 adds mandatory exceptions that every library candidate should be able to tell apart:

• Article 3 — text and data mining for scientific research by research organisations and cultural heritage institutions, on works to which they have lawful access;
• Article 4 — text and data mining by anyone, but only where the rightholder has not expressly reserved the use, for example by machine-readable means for content online;
• Article 6 — copies of works permanently in a cultural heritage institution's collections, in any format or medium, for preservation.

Acquisitions, collections and procurement (duties 1 and 6)

Duty 1 asks for acquisitions "in compliance with procurement and financial regulations". For the EU institutions that means Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2024/2509 of 23 September 2024, the recast Financial Regulation. Collection management follows a written collection development policy (duty 6 says so explicitly); IFLA's Guidelines for a Collection Development Policy Using the Conspectus Model show how one is built.

Reference, research support and innovation (duties 3, 7, 8, 9 and 11)

The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education is organised in six frames, presented alphabetically: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual; Information Creation as a Process; Information Has Value; Research as Inquiry; Scholarship as Conversation; Searching as Strategic Exploration. For literature reviews, PRISMA 2020 is a 27-item checklist (PRISMA-S extends it to reporting the search). For emerging technologies, the Commission's own strategy is its Communication C(2024) 380 of 24 January 2024, "Artificial Intelligence in the European Commission (AI@EC)".

Five Pairs That Look Alike

1. LRM against BIBFRAME. Work–Expression–Manifestation–Item is four levels; BIBFRAME's Work–Instance–Item is three.
2. Article 3 against Article 4 of Directive 2019/790. Research organisations and heritage institutions cannot be opted out of; everyone else can be, by an express reservation.
3. Unique against Total item requests. Unique is the comparable one; Total shows activity.
4. BT/NT against RT. Hierarchical relationships are asymmetric; associative ones are symmetric.
5. The highest cataloguing principle. Convenience of the user comes first; interoperability only wins conflicts among the others.

How to Prepare Between Now and the Tests

• Turn Annex II into a reading list, one or two standards per duty, as above.
• Learn the numbers and the names exactly: thirteen principles, areas 0 to 8, eleven LRM entities, six frames, 27 items.
• Read the directives in your Language 2. EUR-Lex publishes every act in all official languages, and that is the language of your ranking test.
• Do not let a reasoning test end it early. Verbal has its own 10/20 gate; numerical and abstract share a combined one.
• Check your candidate account at least every three calendar days and keep your EU Login email valid until the reserve list is out.

If a question in the field MCQ contains an error, complain through your candidate account within 3 calendar days of the day after the test; the notice allows no request for review of MCQ results.

The same notice covers data processing, analytics and statistics and records and archives management. For the AST career track in general, see our AST competition guide.

Sources

• Notice of competition EPSO/AST/158/26 — OJ C/2026/4963, 6.10.2026
• EPSO competition page
• IFLA Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (2016)
• IFLA Library Reference Model
• BIBFRAME 2.0 model overview
• SKOS Reference (W3C)
• Directive (EU) 2019/790
• Directive 2006/115/EC
• Directive 2001/29/EC

Eligibility, tests, scoring and deadlines are quoted from the notice of competition. The mapping of duties to standards is our preparation guidance.