EPSO AST3 in librarianship: EPSO/AST/158/26

EPSO/AST/158/26, published on 6 October 2026 (Official Journal C/2026/4963), builds reserve lists of AST3 assistants in three fields. Field 2 is librarianship and information science, with 243 places; the others are data and statistics, with 423, and records and archives, with 298. You apply for one field only. The guide to the whole competition covers what the three share.

Annex II of the notice lists 12 typical duties. Grouped, they cover the whole work of an institutional library:

Besides EU citizenship and two EU languages (one at C1, another at B2), you need one of two routes on 11 November 2026:

• Post-secondary studies of at least two years with a diploma in an accepted area, and at least three years of relevant experience after that diploma. A postgraduate diploma or master's in an accepted area, taken after a bachelor's in anything, also counts: a master's in library science after a degree in history, for instance.
• Secondary education giving access to post-secondary studies, and at least six years of relevant experience after it.

The accepted areas are seven: librarianship; information science or studies; information management; documentation science; information systems and computer science; media studies; and book or cultural heritage studies.

Experience is stricter here than in the data field: it counts only if it matches the Annex II duties of librarianship, with no extra list of areas. Work in a public, university or corporate library, a documentation centre or an information service usually fits; check it duty by duty. If you rely on the post-secondary route, you also need a letter from the institution stating the standard length of the programme.

All the tests are remote and proctored. Everyone who applies on time is invited.

The field test is specific to this field: about 80 seconds a question, in your second language. The essay is marked on written communication, not on knowledge. See the guide to the reasoning tests and the guide to the EUFTE.

1. Reasoning is marked first, and only for candidates who completed every test.
2. Those who pass it have the field test marked. Everyone with at least 15/30 is ranked by that score.
3. From the top of that ranking, a limited number of candidates, in principle no more than 1.5 times the places, have their essay marked and their eligibility checked. In this field that is about 364 candidates, plus any ties at the cut-off.
4. Those who pass the essay and are eligible go onto the reserve list, in ranking order, until the 243 places are filled.

So the field test is the only score that counts, and it decides who even gets checked. There is no interview before the list. See how EPSO scores its tests.

The notice publishes no syllabus: the test is "specific to the field". The closest thing is Annex II, which is also what your experience is measured against. Read duty by duty, it points to questions on:

• Cataloguing and metadata: description standards, authority control, subject indexing, classification schemes.
• Knowledge organisation: controlled vocabularies, thesauri and ontologies, and how they are built and kept.
• Library systems: what a library services platform does, workflows, interoperability between systems.
• Collections and acquisitions: selection and withdrawal, collection development policies, buying under public procurement rules.
• Electronic resources: access management, licences, copyright.
• Reference and research support: search strategies, bibliographic databases, literature reviews, subject guides.

At AST level the questions sit closer to doing than to designing. For the EU context, two references are worth knowing, although the notice does not name them: EuroVoc, the EU's multilingual thesaurus, run by the Publications Office, and the copyright rules of Directive (EU) 2019/790, which matter for licences and electronic resources.

1. Check your eligibility now. Count your years of experience from the date of the diploma you rely on, match each job to the Annex II duties, and ask your school or university for the letter with the standard length of the programme. The documents are due by 11 March 2027, but a gap found then cannot be fixed.
2. Do not underestimate reasoning. It only has to be passed, but it comes first, and the numerical test is often the weak point for candidates from the humanities. Numerical and abstract share one pass mark, so a strong abstract can carry a weak numerical.
3. Put most of your time into the field test, in your language 2, covering every group of Annex II duties, including systems and acquisitions if your own job is mostly reference work.
4. Learn the vocabulary in your second language. Authority control, interlibrary loan or discovery layer will reach you in that language.
5. Get used to the screen. EPSO's tests run on TAO, with an on-screen calculator and notepad; paper is not allowed.
6. Apply before the last day. The deadline is 11 November 2026 at 12:00 Brussels time, and the ID copy must be uploaded by then too.