Digital Curation Librarian

Description

Forsyth Library, Fort Hays State University (FHSU) seeks a creative and service-oriented colleague to build, curate, and promote the library's unique digital collections and to partner with others across campus in a variety of academic digital initiatives. The Digital Curation Librarian will work closely with colleagues from the library, the university, and the regional cultural heritage community to ensure that Forsyth Library's digital collections are accessible and available for integration with teaching, research, and learning and that collections contribute to an enlightened understanding of the history of the university and of western Kansas. This position will join a team of library staff committed to effectively manage and preserve distinctive collections and provide access to archives in all formats. The Librarian will also work with faculty, staff and students to incorporate a variety of creative and scholarly works into a digital repository on the open web for greater visibility.

Duties and Responsibilities
The Digital Curation Librarian manages Forsyth Library's locally created digital materials, taking a lead role in the creation, maintenance and stewardship of digital collections, including the digitization of special collections. This position provides strategies for effective management and preservation of library digital assets and participates with colleagues in conversations on scholarly communications, open education materials, and other information systems that require connectivity or integration with digital collections.

The successful candidate will establish priorities, manage projects, create workflows and identify digital collection development opportunities as informed by emerging trends and best practices in digital collection creation and management. Working within Forsyth Library's distributed collection analysis and development environment, this position facilitates communication and workflows across Forsyth's various units and ensures that internal and external stakeholders remain informed and engaged. This position is also responsible for investigating, planning, and managing digital content format conversions and migrations; promoting digital collections; seeking grant funding for digital initiatives, and modeling innovative and flexible solutions that meet the needs of FHSU's faculty, students and staff. This position supervises students assigned to work on digital projects.

Required Qualifications

• American Library Association-accredited Master's degree (MA/MLS/MLIS/MIS).
• Experience managing digital projects.
• Knowledge of emerging best practices related to digital collections, curation, digital preservation, and the requisite technologies that support these practices.
• Experience using a variety of metadata standards used in digital collections (e.g., EAD, MODS, METS, VRA Core, Dublin Core).
• Familiarity with digital and metadata conversion technologies, digital object standards, and optimal workflows for curation.
• Ability to collaborate successfully within FHSU or vendor's technical staff responsible for scripting, programming and systems administration.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively, cooperatively, and collaboratively with a variety of individuals and groups across an organization to accomplish initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to plan, prioritize, coordinate, and implement projects.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, especially for the purpose of describing standards and procedures.
• Comfortable working in an environment that embraces rapid change and collegiality.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 2 or more years experience in building and curating digital collections in a digital repository service (e.g. ContentDM, DSpace, Islandora/Fedora, Digital Commons).
• Experience with XML.
• Knowledge of one or more scripting and/or programming languages, XSLT, HTML, XHTML, CSS and ADA guidelines.
• Familiarity with best practices relating to audio visual materials.
• Supervisory experience.
• Experience working directly with students and faculty.
• Experience with inter-institutional collaboration.
• Successful experience in grant writing and grant management.
• Experience working with digital repository systems.

FHSU invites candidates from diverse backgrounds who will contribute affirmatively and creatively to the university's multicultural environment. Our goal is for our employees to reflect the rich mix of backgrounds, life experiences, cultures, perspectives and world views that is found within our university community.