Description
The University of Chicago Library empowers users with deep and rich collections, extensive expertise, innovative programs, and diverse spaces. We are committed to cultivating an inclusive community, enhancing access to scholarly resources, advancing digital scholarship, engaging locally and globally, and excelling in a changing environment.
The Library is developing and implementing a new strategy to transform collection development and management, one that addresses changing needs and moves us to a place where providing access to information is as important as ownership. This will include collaborative and collective collecting, and will incorporate new forms of scholarship. The Library is deeply committed to advancing diversity equity and inclusion through practice; the Collections Strategy Librarian will explore and advance new methods and strategies for discovering and increasing the diversity of our collections. The Collections Strategist Librarian is an innovative service-oriented librarian who will collaborate across the Library to create and constantly refine the Library's collection strategy towards creating an open, accessible, equitable and transformative contribution to the global knowledge environment.
The Collections Strategist Librarian will work closely with the Associate University Librarian for Collections and Access and collection leaders at UChicago and beyond, including consortial partners such as the Big Ten Academic Alliance's BIG Collection, and Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation efforts. They will also engage in community focused initiatives and activities, through collaborations with partners from campus offices and programs.
The ideal candidate possesses skills and abilities to assess and evaluate our existing collection and identify avenues for future growth and expansion and have some experience leading strategic initiatives or services with a wide range of stakeholders. The candidate will need to analyze our own existing collections, practices, capacities, constraints, and potentials to transform our collections strategy and be creative in solving problems in a collaborative environment.
Responsibilities and Duties
Reporting to the Library's Associate University Librarian for Collections and Access, the Librarian will join a dynamic team that includes Access Services, Technical Services, and Preservation. In particular, the Collections Strategist will:
Analyze our existing collection to understand strengths and weaknesses and to understand current total size and anticipated growth rates. Analyze investments in various parts of the collection to locate areas where our monetary investment does not align with campus priorities.
Collaborate with subject selectors to understand, document and analyze collection practices and advocate for needed changes in our collecting practices and policies and work with individual subject specialists to develop unified collection policies where needed.
Draft various top-level collecting policies as they affect growth the collections, and plan for anticipated collection growth in all areas and collaborate with colleagues to address collection maintenance and storage strategies.
Work closely with the Collections committees of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and Ivy Plus Library Consortium, cooperative programming and collaborative collection development.
Serve on Library and University Committees and represent the library in various local and national groups working to address collection strategies.
Track trends in cooperative and collective collecting, in particular among our key partner groups, BTAA and IPLC, and recommend approaches that we could pursue, and projects that we could benefit from joining.
Develop a holistic and intentional strategy to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in the collection, including articulated collection metrics to assess the impact.
Qualifications
Required
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