Come work with us! Business Research Librarian

We’re looking for a Business Research and Instruction Librarian to join us at Cornell’s Hospitality, Labor, and Management Library!

Apply here!

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Business Research Librarian-31405

Description
The Business & Hospitality Research Team at Cornell University Library is looking for creative and forward-thinking candidates to join their group as a Business Research and Instruction Librarian. The successful candidate will provide research and instruction support to the faculty, students, and staff of the newly announced Cornell College of Business. Above all, candidates must be excited by the opportunity to develop the relationships and services needed to support success at a top-ranked business school.

Duties and Responsibilities:
Reporting to the Assistant Director of Research & Learning Services, the Business Research and Instruction Librarian:

• Designs, teaches, and assesses instruction sessions, including working with faculty to develop curriculum-integrated instructional programs.
• Provides direct research assistance to the College of Business community and Cornell researchers with business information needs.
• Contributes actively to team building, goal setting, and long term planning for the department.
• Collaborates with colleagues and customers across Cornell University.
• Cultivates personal subject knowledge and skills through training and self-directed learning; participates actively in professional organizations, library, and university committees; and engages in scholarly pursuits.

Qualifications

• An ALA-accredited MLS or equivalent graduate degree.
• Demonstrated interest and excitement for business as a discipline.
• Passion for and experience with teaching and research support.
• Strong analytical, quantitative, problem-solving, and critical-thinking skills, especially in a research context.
• Excellent interpersonal, organizational, and written/oral communication skills.
• Ability to resolve competing demands in an environment of fast-paced change.
• Strong service ethic and customer-centered thinking.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and collaboratively in a service-oriented environment.
• Commitment to the Hospitality, Labor and Management Library’s core values of collaboration, excellence, flexibility, innovation, integrity, and service.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Demonstrated excellence in teaching and research support.
• At least 1 year of business research experience in a corporate or academic environment.
• Intermediate to advanced knowledge of Excel or other software relevant to data manipulation and statistical analysis.
• Advanced degree or coursework in business or related fields.
• Willingness to explore the use of new technology or methods in support of effectively achieving goals, with a high tolerance for risk and failure.

Environment:

The Business & Hospitality Research Team serves the newly announced Cornell College of Business, which will be comprised of Cornell’s three accredited business programs: the School of Hotel Administration, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. The College of Business will be one of the most comprehensive business schools in the nation with 145 research faculty and nearly 2,900 undergraduate, professional (MBA), and graduate students. Based on the past success of its future member units, The College of Business will cement the University’s position as a world-class center of teaching and research for business management and entrepreneurship.

In addition to traditional library services that support the academic and career research needs of the College of Business, the Business & Hospitality Research Team welcomes candidates with a keen eye towards innovative and user-focused programs. The librarians in this team are members of the larger Research & Learning Services (RLS) department within the Hospitality, Labor, and Management (HLM) Library. In addition to the College of Business, HLM RLS supports the Industrial and Labor Relations School with a dedicated Labor and Employment Research Team. HLM’s physical footprint includes three facilities integrated into the schools they currently serve. The successful candidate will join a team of 10 professionals serving the hospitality, labor, and business information needs of the university.

Cornell University is an innovative Ivy League university and a great place to work. Our inclusive community of scholars, students and staff impart an uncommon sense of larger purpose and contribute creative ideas to further the university’s mission of teaching, discovery and engagement. Located in Ithaca, NY, Cornell’s far-flung global presence includes the medical college’s campuses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Doha, Qatar, as well as the new Cornell Tech campus to be built on Roosevelt Island in the heart of New York City.

Diversity and Inclusion are a part of Cornell University’s heritage. We are a recognized employer and educator valuing AA/EEO, Protected Veterans, and Individuals with Disabilities.

Come work with us! Railroad Collections Project Archivist

The Kheel Center is hiring an 18-month position is support of this totally awesome project. Description below, link to the application here.

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Railroad Collections Project Archivist-31039

Description
Cornell University Library’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives seeks qualified candidates for an 18-month, temporary professional position as Railroad Collections Project Archivist. The successful candidate will improve description of 65 archival collections documenting railroad history in the United States, coordinate digitization of roughly 1,600 photographs, and assist with outreach efforts related to the project.

With rich manuscript and media collections pertaining to labor unions, management theory and practice, and labor relations and as part of the Martin P. Catherwood Library, the Kheel Center supports the curriculum and research interests of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR School) and attracts scholars nationwide and from all over the world.

The Catherwood Library in the ILR School is the nation’s most comprehensive library for workplace issues, specializing in labor history, human resources, collective bargaining, organizational behavior, and international and comparative labor movements. In 2010, Catherwood consolidated with the Nestlé Hospitality Library and the Management Library to form a single structure serving Cornell’s specialized business and labor Schools. The consolidated structure serves over 1800 undergraduates, 1300 graduate students, 100 resident faculty, and extensive distance education, executive education, and extension programs. Cornell University Library is a leading academic research library with outstanding collections, service and instructional programs, and a leader in digital library applications including digitization of its print collections and development of strategies for curation of the research output of its faculty.

Responsibilities: Reporting to the Director of the Kheel Center and working closely with other staff, the Railroad Collections Project Archivist is responsible for: assessing the detailed description needs for 65 archival collections documenting railroad history; enhancing basic descriptions of those 65 archival collections as appropriate; and coordinating digitization and online delivery of roughly 1,600 photographs from Kheel Center’s railroad collections. The successful candidate may supervise one or two student assistants and will work closely with the Kheel Center’s Director, Technical Services Archivist, and Digital Archivist.

Characteristics: The Railroad Collections Project Archivist is a highly organized and collaborative professional who is able to approach a large, 18-month assignment in a methodical and comprehensive manner. S/he works well with colleagues, drawing on and contributing to their subject and archival expertise, but is also able to work independently. S/he has a strong understanding of standard and traditional archival practices but also embraces the change and opportunities that new technologies bring to the archival field. Most importantly, s/he understands the research process and researchers and can keep their needs in the forefront of their mind when making processing and description decisions.

Under the direction of the Kheel Center Director, does archival technical services work on the Kheel Center’s railroad history collections and coordinates digitization and online delivery of select railroad history photographs. The Railroad Collections Project Archivist may supervise one or two student assistants and works closely with the Kheel Center’s Director, Technical Services Archivist, and Digital Archivist.

Qualifications:

• Master’s degree from an ALA-accredited program with a concentration in archives management, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Knowledge of 20th century US history
• Strong organizational, planning, and problem solving skills
• Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively with a variety of staff in a rapidly changing environment

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience and/or interest in US railroad and labor history
• Experience arranging, describing, and preserving archival, manuscript, photographic, and other non-print materials, including experience processing large collections.
• Experience creating MARC records and EAD guides for archival collections
• Experience working with photographic collections
• Degree in history or a related discipline
• Record of engagement with professional groups and activities and/or contributions to professional or scholarly literature.

Looks like I get to be an Associate Librarian

I’ve been waiting on the official letter from HR to make the public announcement, and now it’s arrived, so:

On August 17, 2016, I will be promoted to the rank of Associate Librarian at the Cornell University Library. I put my promotion packet in last July, and it seems as though it was sufficiently convincing. To say that this is an exciting moment and a load off of my mind would be a grand understatement.

There’s a lot of folks to thank for this: first and foremost my family, who have been hugely supportive of my pursuit of this whole librarian career thing. Thank you, and I love you.

I am also deeply appreciative of the people in my supervisory chain who lent their support to my promotion: Anne Kenney, Kornelia Tancheva, and Curtis Lyons.

I am exceedingly grateful to those who were willing to write letters of recommendation to the promotion committee on my behalf: Cheryl Beredo, Esta Bigler, Amy Buckland, Suzanne Cohen, Aliqae Geraci, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Michelle Paolillo, Oya Reiger, and Jill Wilson.

And massive thanks to Suzanne, Curtis, and Deb Lamb-Deans, who gave me great feedback on my promotion packet.

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank all the folks with whom I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with during my career at Cornell, not only within the university but also through organizations like SLA. There is very little that I’ve done as a librarian that I feel comfortable claiming sole credit for, so thank you for working with me on so much cool stuff.

Uploading CBAs to DigitalCommons@ILR

Yes, this is a blog post about a blog post.

As part of the grant we got from the NHPRC to digitize and disseminate collective bargaining agreements, we are documenting those efforts in a blog. I just uploaded a post discussing uploading CBAs and this post couldn’t get any more meta unless I started discussing metadata which I do in the blog post so I’m going to stop now.

Here’s a short excerpt; please go check out the whole thing if you’re interested:

As discussed on this blog in September, Digital Consulting & Production Services has been working on digitizing shipments of the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in the education retail industries. Once those digital copies are returned to Kheel, it’s time to make them available to the world. That’s where DigitalCommons@ILR comes into the picture. 

A terrible keynote, but a very solid DrupalCamp

On Monday, I attended DrupalCamp here at Cornell. Overall, the event was great. Though I was hindered by a nasty cold that had set in over Thanksgiving break, the sessions I attended were excellent: one talked about web accessibility, providing both historical and legal context and then providing practical advice for using the tools of responsive web design to create accessible sites. Another talked about preparing for Drupal, and again gave an excellent overview of what was involved in the creation of a Drupal site before digging into the pragmatic needs of such an endeavor. Wonderful stuff, and just the sort of thing that got me to sign up in the first place.

The keynote, sadly, was another story. For whatever reason, the organizers gave over this important task to a representative of one of the vendors, and it was disastrous. I documented this on Twitter:

[View the story “In which I endure a keynote nominally about Drupal” on Storify]

(NOTE: I am not sure why WordPress won’t let me embed the Storify. I’ve tried several times and no longer care.)

Like I said, the rest of the event was excellent. In fact, I’m willing to assume at this point that the speaker — or more likely, his employer Acquia — promised the organizers a very different speech. But the “you need to think like a business!” rhetoric we got was wholly inappropriate; whether or not you think that mindset has any validity*, it’s certainly not new thinking. We’ve been living it for as long as I’ve been working in academic libraries, and playing buzzword bingo*** with us isn’t inspirational, it’s insulting.

I went to DrupalCamp to get a bit more insight into using Drupal; I’m not a developer, but I wanted a better context for working with the developers on several upcoming projects. I got that, and would attend similar events in the future. I also got a good story out of it, so all in all I’d call the event a success.

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* Note: I don’t. It’s better served in another post, but the short version is that academic institutions aren’t businesses, and the principles that currently drive business in Western society don’t even produce successful businesses, so we can’t expect them to produce a viable academy. Not to say there aren’t things that can be learned from other sectors and spheres, but we can’t expect success by pretending that they aren’t other sectors and spheres.**

** Actually, that might be my whole post on the topic. We’ll see.

*** I almost shouted “BINGO!” when he put up the “THE FUTURE IS AGILE!” slide, though to be fair that might be the free square in the middle of the board.

New year, new gig (kinda): Digital Scholarship Fellow

Okay, so it’s really an additional gig, but who am I to deny the lure of parallelism?

First things first: it’s new student welcome day here at Cornell, so campus is something of a zoo. (Well, that’s unfair: zoo denizens generally know where they’re supposed to be.) As chaotic as this day can be, I love it: so many folks on the threshold of new knowledge, connections, and perspectives. My general cynicism about universities’ conversion into worker mills is forced to recede in the face of today’s breathless enthusiasm. This institution still holds the power to be transformative, and I love being a part of that, and love seeing new members of our community engage with it.

Also, as I’ve said before: some of these folks will fall in love with Ithaca and never want to leave, and I know how that tune goes.

Now onto the new, additional gig.

As of September, I will be one of three newly-minted Digital Scholarship Fellows here at the Cornell University Library. My peers are the awesome Dianne Dietrich and Erin Eldermire, whose work to date leaves me humble, whose Fellowship goals get me excited, and whose names make me oddly jealous with regards to alliteration.

My Fellowship is a one-year term, taking up 25% of my time. In that time, I’m going to work with folks from within the Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services (DSPS) unit and around CUL to take a look at how digital repositories are handled around campus and try to forge a coherent policy on issues like software, staffing and workflows, collection development, and sustainability. Truth be told, I’m not sure how much will get done in a year, but the situation on campus demands this kind of analysis and the Fellowship should give me access to the resources and very smart people necessary to at least make a dent in this thing.

Of course, I’ll still be doing at least 75% of my current job; I have to give up my ref desk shifts, tough, which I’m actually quite sad about. I’m always apprehensive about digital projects folks getting silo’d away from their community, and so I’ve tried to protect my public services responsibilities. But there was no way around the fact that they’d be the first to go if the Fellowship came through, so I’ll deal. I’ll likely get to come back to them in a year’s time.

I say “likely” because there’s another bit of parallelism to all this: with all the potential for change and new ideas in the way CUL deals with repositories, it’s quite possible that this next year will be transformative for me and my career, too. The job I’m doing a year from now may not have all that much in common with the one I’m doing today. One of the reasons I went for this Fellowship is to make sure I had a voice in how that plays out, but even so the amount that’s unknown is scary and exciting.

As a great philosopher once said, bring on next year.

Wanna come work for me?

Yup, this one’s actually a position that I’ll be supervising, so… take that as you will. It’s part-time and benefits-eligible, but is not an academic position.

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Digital Projects Assistant-20712

Description
Cornell University Library’s Hospitality, Labor and Management Library is seeking a Digital Projects Assistant. As a member of the Digital Projects Group, the Digital Projects Assistant would be responsible for facilitating the editing, uploading and managing of online content for the School of Hotel Administration’s online digital repository. The most important responsibilities of this position include preparation of selected materials for digitization and uploading of objects to the repository; the successful candidate may help direct the work of student assistants. The Digital Resources Assistant maintains and promotes the Hospitality, Labor, and Management Library’s core values of collaboration, excellence, flexibility, innovation, integrity, and service.

This is a half-time, benefits-eligible, position (20 hours per week) for a term of two years.

Saying goodbye with an unconference

This month, I finish up my time on Cornell University Library’s Reference and Outreach Committee. I served for three years, two of those as co-chair. (That second year was my fault, too, as I talked them into setting up a staggered co-chair system to address the fact that the committee’s leadership and membership change right as we’re gearing up for orientation, R&O’s biggest responsibility. And I figured I shouldn’t recommend that if I wasn’t willing to do it myself.)

R&O was a committee I wanted to be on ever since I started attending their monthly forums: any group who gave librarians regular opportunities to talk about cool stuff they were working on was a group I wanted to be involved with. All in all, it’s been a great experience, though at times difficult and trying. I will miss it, even as I enjoy getting a little bit more time back each month.

One of the last events of my tenure was the first annual R&O Unconference, which we held back in May. We’d been asked to take on something new this year, as a long-time responsibility had been taken off our plate; the Unconference was what we came up with. We started planning it in the fall, figuring out what mix of structured and unstructured activity to include, and how to convince the CUL community (most of whom had never been to an unconference, including most of the R&O Committee) to buy into the latter.

We ended up getting two rooms and running the event from 10am to 3pm in Mann Library (and providing lunch from Manndible, which was key). The one structured piece was a series of lightning talks in the morning, with most of the speakers signing up in advance. We took care to have the talks occur in a different location than the registration, coffee, and danishes; this paid off when, even as a majority of attendees went to hear the talks, at least two groups of them stayed to participate in breakout discussions. We also had two folks sign up to give lightning talks on the spot, which was awesome. (And my lightning talk on the DigitalCommons@ILR user survey contained what could be the greatest slide I’ve ever made.)

The breakout discussion model carried the afternoon, with folks migrating from group to group and groups transitioning from topic to topic with an ease that filled me with joy. Overall, the event was very well received, at least one or two new projects seem to be spawning out of it, and it looks probable that the R&O Committee will be holding one next year, as well.

That one, I just get to attend.

I posted pictures to both Facebook and Google+, if you’re interested in checking them out. But I want to wrap this post up by thanking everyone who’s been on R&O during my tenure: Kaila Bussert and Susan Kendrick, who set great examples as chairs when I joined; Jean Callihan and Jeff Peterson who were my fellow members during my first year; Hilary Wong who’s been my co-chair this past year and has done such a phenomenal job; and Virginia Cole, Sarah How, Kevin Pain, Marsha Taichman, and Jill Wilson, who have contributed so much as committee members and all did such great work preparing for the Unconference. And my thoughts and thanks especially go to Nan Hyland, who passed away in 2011, and whom we miss and mourn.

Thank you all. It’s been amazing.

Refusal anxiety

It’s a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon. I just ate lunch out on the quad in the sun, enjoyed a delicious iced coffee, and am feeling reasonably prepared for the rest of my work day. And yet, I’m oddly anxious.

Why? Because the annual call for committee volunteers ends today, and I’m not putting my name in for anything. And it is freaking me out.

This decision wasn’t taken lightly, nor is it an issue of procrastination. It’s a planned refocusing of my time for the next year. I’m still on or otherwise involved with a couple of committees at the Cornell University Library level. Within the Hospitality, Labor, and Management Library, I still sit on the leadership group and an ongoing search committee; it’s likely I’ll be leading a search committee of my own before the year is out. I’m the president of UNYSLA until December, then I’ll be past president and nominations chair for a year, and I plan to stay on the (admittedly casual) steering committee for SLUSH for the foreseeable future.

I’m not exactly avoiding group work, is what I’m saying.

There’s plenty of other stuff to occupy my work time over the next year, too; I’ve got at least two major projects that I’ll likely write about here when they’re better fit for public scrutiny, and the possibility of another that’d be even bigger. And that’s not even touching the three — three! — outstanding research projects I should be working on. All of these things, taken together, indicate that not only will I have plenty to do, but the chances of anyone (even the promotional committee of my darkest nightmares)  looking at this decision askance are slim to nil. Plus, it’s not like these committees won’t be around next year.

And still, I’m twitchy about this. Let’s see if I can make it the next few hours without caving and throwing my name in for something.

EDIT: Oh gods, the call’s open until Friday. I’m doomed.

Two opportunities to come work with me!

There are two very different academic librarian gigs currently available  in the Hospitality, Labor, and Management Library (HLM) here at Cornell: The Associate Director of the HLM Library, and the Business Research Librarian for the Nestlé Library.