Position Type:

This position is a 12-month tenure-track faculty appointment at the Assistant Professor level (minimum starting salary of $74,671).  This is a calendar year appointment with an expected start date of January 2022. This position reports to the Chair, Technical Services, and Director of Distinctive Collections. Recent graduates and early career professionals are encouraged to apply.

Position Summary:

The University of Rhode Island University Libraries seeks a highly motivated individual for the position of Assistant Professor, Digital Preservation Manager. The incumbent will play a central role in building and sustaining a digital preservation program.

They will use collaborative and innovative approaches to lead the Libraries’ effort to ensure the long-term preservation of and ongoing access to research data, university records, and other unique digital resources in support of the University’s dynamic teaching and research environment.

The Digital Preservation Manager will lead the development of a digital assets (primarily born-digital records and media) program for the University in support of Distinctive Collections’ wider collecting initiatives. In this role, the incumbent will work closely with existing faculty and staff to create policies, procedures, and workflows for processing, preserving, and managing born-digital assets and hybrid archives.

As part of the Distinctive Collections team, the successful candidate will provide leadership across the URI community for the preservation and long-term accessibility to the institution’s digital assets. These assets include born-digital and digitized records, research datasets, images, and audio and audiovisual materials, as well as software code, collection metadata, business data, web archives, and hybrid collections. This position also provides oversight for Distinctive Collections’ suite of information systems (ArchiveSpace, Preservica) and digital archives hardware (FRED). They will coordinate with Alma, Primo, and DigitalCommons product owners.

They will advise departments and donors on the management of electronic records, as well as orchestrate the transfer of electronic assets to the university archives. They will also assist University researchers with the organization, management, and curation of research data to enhance its preservation and access now and into the future.

Library faculty are reviewed and promoted based on librarianship and teaching, research, and service. The research/teaching target areas for this position are:

• Digital Archives
• Digital Preservation
• Computational Archival Science
• Data Analytics
• Data Curation
• Digital Libraries
• Media/Digital Obsolescence
• Privacy and Data Ethics

The incumbent will teach, present workshops and other programming on digital preservation topics to faculty, researchers, and students.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Lead the development, documentation, implementation, and maintenance of policies and standards for digital preservation including digital preservation plan, digital preservation policy, workflows and documentation, and archival storage plan.
• Administer the digital preservation management system.
• Develop processes for the routine acquisition, preservation, and access of born-digital materials given to Distinctive Collections, including datasets, email, websites, social media, and other electronic records.
• Survey departments and offices for born-digital university records of enduring legal, administrative, and historical value. Facilitate transfer of permanent e-records to Distinctive Collections.
• Collaborate with the library-based Big Data Collaborative, dataspark, and other university units working on related problems in digital asset retention and research data archiving.
• Advise and assist faculty, researchers, and students on projects that require digital preservation strategies. Participate in local, regional, and national digital preservation initiatives and projects.
• Maintain and disseminate information about best practices in electronic records and research data management via presentations, reports, websites, and publications.
• Continuously expand knowledge of records and data management practices as well as with laws and policies that affect university records and research data. Display continuing growth in professional and subject knowledge.
• Monitor trends and developments in artificial intelligence, big data, and emerging technologies as they relate to archives and recommend appropriate adoption and implementation of new technologies and methods.
• Evaluate and implement specialized tools that characterize, describe, and/or transform born-digital content as needed.
• Manage ingest of selected websites and other web content and born-digital materials.
• Coordinate the transfer of digital materials from a variety of current and legacy media formats such as tapes, floppy disks, CDs, and hard drives, and implement mechanisms for ensuring the authenticity, preservation, and access of this material.
• Supervise and train staff and student assistants.
• Support the Distinctive Collections Unit by providing research support service.
• Proactively integrate considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and accessibility into work with library technology, resources, and services.

Application deadline:

The search will remain open until the position has been filled. First consideration will be given to applications received by September 24, 2021. Second consideration may be given to applications received by October 23, 2021. Applications received subsequent to second consideration date (October 23, 2021) may not be given full consideration.