Data Science Librarian

Research Advisory Services Program / Research Data Curation Program

The University of California San Diego Library seeks applications from highly motivated, innovative, collaborative, and service-oriented professionals to join the Library as our Data Science Librarian (Assistant, Associate or Full Librarian). This position reports to the Assistant Director of the Library’s Research Advisory Services Program (RAS) with additional assigned responsibilities in the Research Data Curation Program (RDCP).

The University of California San Diego Library is committed to supporting academic excellence and diversity within the faculty, staff, and student body.

The University and the Library

With 36,000 students, UC San Diego is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through excellence in education and research at the undergraduate, graduate, professional school and postdoctoral levels.  UC San Diego has been recognized as one of the top 10 public universities in the nation by US News & World Report, as the 14th best university in the world by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In 2016, for the seventh consecutive year UC San Diego was ranked 1st in the nation by the Washington Monthly’s College Guide based on the positive impact the university has had on the country in terms of enabling social mobility, research productivity and civic engagement.

The Research Advisory Services Program (RAS) collaboratively supports the UC San Diego Library’s mission of providing world class resources to meet the evolving teaching, learning, and research needs of our users. RAS actively participates in and shapes discovery, engages in the co-production of knowledge and tools and strives to consistently meet and exceed our users’ access and information expectations. Within this framework, Data and GIS are major areas that the Program supports.

The Research Data Curation Program (RDCP) provides a suite of services for the campus research community. This includes helping to create data management plans, consultations and customized workshops on metadata and data management best practices, assistance creating identifiers for data and people, ingest of research data into the Library’s Digital Collections website for sharing and discovery, preservation of data via Chronopolis and customized workshops and training on a variety of data-related applications.

Responsibilities of the Position

The Data Science Librarian is the leader within the UC San Diego Library for managing and providing data and statistical services, with an emphasis on social sciences data. Responding to increasing campus demand for data literacy, the forward-thinking incumbent will play a significant role in the library and on campus, providing service offerings to meet changing research and scholarly needs. The candidate will collaborate with subject and format librarians to outreach to campus constituents, provide data-focused instruction, workshops, and research consultation services. The incumbent will be clustered within a creative group of librarians and library staff specializing in Data, GIS, Digital Scholarship, and MapsDevelop, implement, and manage data services and collections

• Select and support datasets and statistical software to meet campus curricular and research needs
• Provide in-depth research consultations on discovering and analyzing datasets, software development, analytic tools, and data management best practices
• Engage with campus partners to make digital and scholarly data work openly discoverable, accessible, and reusable
• Collaborate with subject librarians, Information Technology Services, and researchers to identify, evaluate, and test data science applications and hardware in support of the research data lifecycle (obtaining, analyzing, and communicating findings)
• Partner with data curation and subject librarians to provide instructional workshops and training sessions to support data literacy, data analytical skills, and data-related best practices including data management and reproducible research
• Engage with campus and broader communities, such as Software Carpentry, to develop instructional materials and workshops
• With the GIS Librarian, jointly manage the Data & GIS Lab
• Provide project leadership or participate in projects related to data services
• Participate in and provide feedback for data-related local and/or UC-wide data-related activities and projects
• Serve as the Library’s liaison to ICPSR and DDI initiatives and represent the UC San Diego Library at pertinent meetings and conferences

Required Qualifications

• Professional degree from a library school or other appropriate degree or equivalent experience in one or more fields relevant to library services
• Ability to download and transform data files to meet the various needs of users
• Proficient with social sciences statistical packages and software, such as SPSS, STATA, SAS, R, Python
• Experience providing numeric data services support in an academic setting, such as data reference and instruction
• Superior organizational, analytical, and communication skills
• A strong commitment to excellence in service and ability to work both independently and collaboratively
• Ability to develop effective relationships with internal and external departments to further dataset management projects
• Strong commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.

Desired Qualifications

• Undergraduate and/or graduate degree in the social sciences
• Experience with GIS data and applications
• Experience in collection development activities in an academic library
• Experience with data curation in an academic environment

Librarians at UC San Diego are academic appointees and entitled to appropriate professional leave and all other perquisites granted to non-faculty academic personnel. UC San Diego Librarians are expected to participate in library-wide and system-wide planning and governance and to be professionally active. Appreciation of, a sensitivity to, and respect for a rich and diverse academic environment, inclusive of students, faculty, and staff of varying social, economic, cultural, ideological and ethnic backgrounds, and those with disabilities.

• Salary: Salary and level of appointment in the Librarian series commensurate with qualifications and experience and based on the University of California pay scales.
• Closing Date: Application consideration begins September 18, 2017.
• To Apply: For full consideration, please submit applications to:

https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/apply/JPF01506

• Please provide the following:

1. A short application letter addressing your interest in this position and applicable qualifications
2. A resume of education and relevant experience
3. The names of at least three persons who are knowledgeable about your qualifications and/or suitability for this position
4. A personal statement summarizing your past or planned contributions to diversity; guidance for preparing diversity statements can be found at:

Center for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion

Partner Opportunities Program:  UC San Diego recognizes that your employment decisions may involve dual career considerations. UCSD provides online and in-person career and relocation assistance to spouses and partners of academic appointees.

AA-EOE: UCSD is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer with a strong institutional commitment to excellence through diversity.