FACULTY & AP POSITIO REQUEST
Proposing Division,
Unit, Group or
Individual
Content Access Management (CAM) and Illinois Harvest
Proposed Title
Metadata Librarian (2 of 2 requests)
Faculty Rank
Assistant Professor
Estimated Salary
$45,000-$47,000
Potential sources of
funding for position
At the end of May 2007, the retirement of Monographic
Cataloging Senior Library Specialist position ($40,135) and
Technical Services (Acquisitions and Monographic
Cataloging) student wage money
Michael Norman, Head of Content Access Management
Reports to
Recommended time
frame for filling
(immediate need, 6
months, 1 year, etc.) and
explanation
Right now, this Metadata Librarian position is funded
through August 15, 2007 through non-recurring monies from
Illinois State Representative Naomi Jacobbsen and campus
to fund Illinois Harvest and the Library’s large scale
digitization projects. We are thinking the permanent position
could start next fiscal year, after July 1, 2007, but to start the
search process in the next few weeks.
Position eed &
Rationale: explain how
this position contributes
to the Library’s strategic
goals
One Metadata Librarian position has already been funded.
We had always planned on requesting the repurposing of two
staff positions into 2 Metadata Librarian positions. We
waited closer to the pending retirement of a staff member to
send forward this second request.
The Library has made large-scale digitization a priority this
past year with the Illinois Harvest and Open Content
Alliance projects and we have made significant progress
with working with digitization and the individual digital
objects produce through this work. As always, good
metadata is critical to our users searching and finding these
resources. And, in fact, CAM has learned cataloging and
creating metadata in a non-MARC world. The two Visiting
Metadata Librarian positions funded with Naomi Jacobbsen
and campus monies have provided essential help and
guidance as we learn all we can about digital objects,
Brief position
description and job
duties
creating best practices, and then establishing effective
workflows for our digitization efforts. To do this critical dayto-day work (including programming, processing of
materials, metadata creation, OAI Harvesting, and web-page
and portal design), it will be difficult to pull this time and
effort from our current duties in CAM. This visiting position
has already become a contact point with many other
departments and units in the Library, including Systems and
IT, departmental libraries, Rare Books and Special
Collections, Archives, and others. Taking this staff position
and converting it into a permanent Metadata Librarian
position will be an important step forward for this Library to
build the digital library infrastructure we need to do this
important work.
Duties and Responsibilities: The University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign Library seeks innovative individuals to
provide expertise and guidance in metadata schemas and
standards and to assist in their implementation within the
Library. The Metadata Librarian is responsible for helping
plan and manage metadata production for digital projects for
the Illinois Harvest Project and of the University of Illinois
Libraries. Responsibilities include providing leadership,
expertise and management relating to metadata production
for description, access and preservation of digital materials
acquired or held by the UIUC Libraries. Additionally, this
position will collaborate with appropriate personnel and
working groups to advise on the application of current and
emerging metadata schema to facilitate access to digital
collections. The librarian will also investigate and develop
applications for improving access to digital collections and
facilitate metadata scheme specification and adaptation.
Additionally, this position will coordinate the work of staff
involved in metadata production including providing training
and technical assistance to other department staff. The
librarian will also coordinate the formulation &
implementation of policies & standards for descriptive,
technical and administrative metadata that are used to
support the production, management of and access to the
Libraries’ digital collections, including AACR2, MARC,
LCSH, LCC, VRA, Dublin Core, EAD, geospatial metadata,
METS, MODS, XML, and OAI- PMH. This position will
also serve as a resource person and will participate in the
Library’s research and development efforts and prepare
necessary documentation and reports regarding metadata
creation.
The Metadata Librarian is a faculty position reporting to the
Head of Content Access Management (CAM). Primary job
duties include: metadata remediation, metadata
transformation, and metadata creation using the appropriate
metadata schemas to support the Illinois Harvest Portal and
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library’s
growing digital collections. Metadata is provided within the
Library’s digital resources systems including ContentDM,
DSpace, DLXS, Olive, within OCLC for inclusion in the
local Voyager system and/or other local systems in iShare,
the Illinois consortial online catalog, and other possible
digital library systems. The librarian will assist in metadata
harvesting using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and creating collection
level records and descriptions of various collections. She or
he will help the Head of Content Access Management and
other faculty and staff involved in the digitization work in
the planning for and implementation of metadata provision
for digital resources, including the selection of metadata
schema, data elements, thesauri, crosswalks, and XSLT
stylesheets. May train and act as a resource for metadata
creation to members of the Content Access Management
Services (CAMS) department, Libraries faculty and staff,
and members of academic departments as needed.
How might this position
evolve to meet
continuing Library
needs in 5-10 years?
This is a critical position for the Library as we start to build
the UIUC Digital Library. The Illinois Harvest and LargeScale Digitization project with Open Content Alliance is the
beginning of converting many of our collections into digital
form. Providing the best possible access to our digital
collections is important to allowing researchers to find and
use these eminent resources. The books we digitized for
Open Content Alliance have already been downloaded over
13,000 times. Creating quality metadata is crucial to
enabling users to find these digital objects and collections.
Much of the metadata created fall outside the traditional
MARC cataloging environment. This is the first position
devoted entirely to non-MARC cataloging and the need for
additional positions to do this work will need to occur to help
the UIUC Library make that transition to be a great digital
library. This position and others will continue to evolve over
the next 5-10 years to meet the cataloging and access needs
of everything we want to enable our users to find and
retrieve for their research needs. This position will help train
and prepare all the Library’s catalogers to work in this
emerging environment
Library EC, rev. Sept. 2006