Director of Digital Curation & Open Infrastructure

Description

We’re looking for someone to help us build something different. Carnegie Mellon University prides itself on collaborative, interdisciplinary, pragmatic, groundbreaking research--- and that spirit carries into its Libraries. As we shift into a post-pandemic posture, we’re rethinking everything: our physical space, our educational, cultural, and research programs, our collections, and our digital infrastructure. We recognize that we have a prime opportunity to think more holistically about the diverse range of digital tools, platforms, and systems that we provide and operate, and therefore, we want to seize this chance to develop comprehensive, sustainable, and long-ranged plans. 

The Director of Digital Curation & Open Infrastructure is a new faculty-level position that reports to the Associate Dean for Innovation & Interdisciplinarity. The key attributes we're seeking are the abilities to organize, coordinate, prioritize, implement, and sustain digital services. In short, we’re looking for a facilitative professional to help us design and manage a new type of digital infrastructure. 

This position has three principal components: 
 

1. Direct oversight of a Digital Curation Team. This position will supervise and provide operational management to an emerging team composed of digitization and metadata specialists, systems engineers, analysts, and developers, a repository manager, and a collections information architect.  

1. Technical Leadership across the Digital Ecosystem. We want to harness the potential of working across platforms and optimizing for openness and interoperability. This is an opportunity to consider new relationships between various repositories, digital archives & libraries, and related systems. It is also a chance to explore synchronicity between services and tools that support teaching, research, and publishing. This director will be encouraged and empowered to think beyond traditional “library territories” and to consider inventive and integrative ways to manage across the larger digital ecosystem.  

1. Open Infrastructure Strategy. Like most research libraries, we are deeply invested in various open initiatives. Our faculty and staff operate widely across open access, open education, open publishing, open-source tools, open science, and open data. Our aspiration is to develop a more unified strategy: this position will explore ways to better integrate our open efforts and to help streamline related operations from a technical perspective.  

Qualifications

We are seeking someone who is fascinated with digital curation and its great potential. At CMU, we use this term expansively to include anything from decades-old documents to immersive software created today. This could be scientific datasets or massive collections of historical photographs. We’re looking for someone to help us connect the dots and connect the systems across this digital spectrum. Rather than presenting a long list of responsibilities or various qualifications, we prefer a more open-ended inclusive approach. We want to consider a wide range of diverse candidates.  

The successful person in this role will be interested in transforming and revolutionizing libraries and particularly the digital services ecosystem. The core attributes we’re seeking include effective facilitation, an affinity for systems-thinking, and a drive for execution and productivity.  

Application Instructions

We are offering an opportunity to experiment and deploy new models, frameworks, and approaches, and therefore, we’re seeking candidates who are up for the challenge of shaping ground-breaking library services and digital collections. As we consider what the next generation digital infrastructure will look like and the future of openness, our intention is to empower the Director to help us chart the path forward. 

The Director of Digital Curation & Open Infrastructure will join a cohort of other newly created director positions, adding greater alignment and functional perspective across the libraries. This new model opens opportunities for enhanced collaboration and cooperation. We intend to support this cohort of directors with shared professional development opportunities including agile and lean management practices, as well as user experience design. 

We want to hear from candidates with a creative and innovative thirst that is grounded in results-oriented pragmatism. We encourage you to utilize your cover letter as a means to distinguish yourself and to outline your views and aspirations on the future of digital curation and open initiatives and the strategies that can lead in that direction.