Metadata Librarians

Description

The UC San Diego Library is looking for two extraordinary and knowledgeable professionals to join our staff in the role of Metadata Librarians.

The UC San Diego Library is committed to supporting academic excellence and diversity within the faculty, staff, and student body.

We have two positions available:
* Temporary, for two years from date of hire
* Permanent

About the UC San Diego Library
The UC San Diego Library, ranked among the nation’s top 25 public academic libraries, plays a critical role in advancing and supporting the university’s research, teaching, patient care, and public service missions. The world-renowned research for which UC San Diego is known starts at the UC San Diego Library, which provides the foundation of knowledge needed to advance cutting-edge discoveries in a wide range of disciplines, from healthcare and science to public policy and the arts.

The UC San Diego Library is widely recognized as an innovative leader in the development, management, and delivery of digital resources to support the university’s world-class research and instruction. The Library plays a leadership role in HathiTrust, an international partnership of 52 academic and research libraries committed to long-term digital preservation, and also plays a central role in data curation, a critical part of the University’s research cyberinfrastructure initiative.

Program Description
The Research Data Curation and Metadata Services programs are two collaborative programs within the UC San Diego Libraries. Metadata Services (MS) incorporates traditional cataloging (including a team that provides services for the UC system) as well as metadata support for digital objects, database management, and manuscripts and archives processing. Research Data Curation (RDC) is one of the Library’s newest programs, born of the commitment of the Library to digital preservation and lifecycle management.

RDC supports a core piece of the Library’s Strategic Plan, engaging with partners to make digital scholarly work and data openly discoverable and accessible for the long term. In response to the growing campus-wide data management and data preservation challenges, the Library actively supports open data and open access by collaborating with faculty, researchers, students and other partners to ensure the long-term curation and accessibility of scholarly works in all formats.

The scale of the challenge regarding the stewardship of digital data requires that responsibilities be distributed across multiple entities and partnerships that engage institutions, disciplines, and interdisciplinary domains. For this reason, the Research Data Curation Program operates in collaboration with UCSD Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) and the University of California Curation Center (UC3).

Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) is a UC San Diego-sponsored program that offers campus researchers facilities, storage, data curation, computing, and networking to facilitate their research using shared cyberinfrastructure services across campus.

The RCI program is designed to provide cost-effective, reliable services which can be utilized by UCSD principal investigators in their current research efforts and incorporated in proposals for future research.

RCI has a number of services, including the data curation services. In the spring of 2011, the UC San Diego RCI Implementation Team invited researchers and research teams to participate in the Research Curation and Data Management Pilot program. Twenty applications were received and after due deliberation the RCI Oversight Committee selected five curation-intensive projects.

The pilot participants received assistance with the creation of metadata to make data discoverable and available for future re-use; with the ingest of data into the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s (SDSC) new Cloud Storage system, which is accessible via high-speed networks; and with the movement of data into Chronopolis, a geographically-dispersed preservation system. More information about the pilot projects can be found at http://rci.ucsd.edu/data-curation/pilots.html

Metadata Services connects our UCSD community to intellectual and creative content and materials by analyzing, describing and organizing resources using methods and systems that promote discovery. MS provides, augments and normalizes metadata for digitized and born-digital objects and for tangible resources—particularly collections of distinction for which UC San Diego is known. MS delivers and manages bibliographic access to licensed and open access electronic resources in all formats. The program includes approximately 37 FTE staff in four core service areas.

Within MS, the Metadata Analysis and Specification group establishes and manages metadata standards and policies for metadata creation and encoding practices. The group advises on metadata creation, and provides metadata augmentation, manipulation, normalization, and mapping for digitized and born-digital objects. Staff provides consulting services on tools, standards, controlled vocabularies, and workflows for metadata creation.

Responsibilities of the Position
Each position will work partly in the Metadata Services Program and partly in the Research Data Curation Program.

The temporary position will focus 60% time on research data sets, and the permanent position will focus 70% time on the digital objects being prepared for ingest into our Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS).

The successful candidates for these positions will work collaboratively with two other metadata specialists already on our staff.

Both positions will also work closely with staff in the Digital Library Program and in Information Technology Services to achieve our librarywide goal of developing and delivering a robust and high quality discovery and management tool for digital objects. Both positions will provide metadata services related to digital objects and research data.

These Metadata Librarians will interact with curators, archivists, librarians, project managers, technologists, researchers and students to analyze their metadata. They will advise and assist data owners, and will propose techniques for normalizing and mapping metadata that can be aggregated and shared. The objects and their metadata will come from many sources--from library collections (text, still image, moving image, etc.) to data sets from campus researchers.

We have an in-house-developed Digital Asset Management System (DAMS4). The metadata creation and editing tools are still under development, which makes this an exciting time to come on board. We are actively designing for a linked data future.

* Consults with data and content owners (library staff and campus researchers) on metadata strategies, including introducing them to best practices, selection of appropriate metadata standards and schemas, and advising on tools and workflows for metadata creation and cleanup.
* Analyzes metadata from data and content owners for quality and completeness, making recommendations of changes for consistency and to assure coherent aggregation with other metadata in the DAMS.
* Prepares instructions for metadata processing prior to the ingest of objects and collections into the DAMS.
* Provides quality control review of digital objects and metadata following ingest.
* Contributes to planning of long term metadata strategy for UCSD Library and the DAMS.
* Assists with specifications for DAMS development as needed.
* Contributes to the development and revisions of policies, schemas, and guidelines to support the DAMS.
* Advises on standards, vocabulary control, taxonomy support, database management

To Apply:
For full consideration, please submit applications to https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/apply/JPF00434

Please provide the following:

1. A short application letter addressing your interest in leading this program and applicable qualifications
2. A resume of education and relevant experience
3. The names of at least three persons who are knowledgeable about your qualifications and/or suitability for this position
4. A personal statement summarizing your past or planned contributions to diversity; guidance for preparing diversity statements can be found at: http://facultyequity.ucsd.edu/Faculty-Applicant-C2D-Info.asp

UCSD is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer with a strong institutional commitment to excellence through diversity.