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Associate Director for Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA

Posted January 29, 2015

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries seek an accomplished senior manager to lead its programs for the stewardship of the full range of general, archival, and special collections that support MIT’s mission. The Associate Director will lead a group of innovative and entrepreneurial staff in developing resources and services that support MIT’s education and research programs and that facilitate worldwide scholarly communication. This leader will also be responsible for fostering the strong collaborative relationships required between the acquisition and development of content, and the services that directly support their access, preservation, and use.

The Associate Director will bring a collaborative approach to setting strategic directions and managing collection activities. The Collections directorate encompasses several critical spheres of activities within the MIT Libraries. These include all centralized operations related to acquiring, storing, preserving, and facilitating discovery through metadata creation and enhancement to the Libraries’ physical and digital collections; licensing and managing access to a rapidly growing array of digital content; managing and preserving digitized and born-digital materials across their life cycle; and all archives, rare books, special collections, and records management activities. Reporting to the Director of Libraries, the Associate Director oversees three departments totaling nearly 60 staff – Collections Strategy and Management; Curation and Preservation Services; and the Institute Archives and Special Collections, which includes MIT’s Records Management Program and the Lewis Music Library.

The Associate Director is a member of the Libraries’ senior management team, and participates in strategic planning, program development and evaluation, budget formulation, and resource allocation. S/he also participates in planning for new and renovated library spaces, plays a role in fundraising and resource development programs, and promotes the visibility of the Libraries both within and outside MIT. With the Director and other Associate Directors, s/he is responsible for developing collaborative relationships with other MIT departments, universities, and organizations; and for representing the MIT Libraries regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Required Qualifications for the position include:

  • Advanced academic degree. (PhD or professional degree preferred.)
  • Seven or more years of successful management and supervisory experience in increasingly responsible positions.
  • Significant experience in a research library including strategic planning and budgeting.
  • Experience in collection development and management.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of:
  • Best practices and current trends in both digital and physical resource management and operations.
  • Copyright and intellectual property issues.
  • Archives, rare books, special collections, and records management theory and practice.
  • Preservation and digital content management.
  • Demonstrated success in:
  • Leading and managing organizational change.
  • Collaboration and strategic partnering.
  • Excellent interpersonal and communication skills including the ability to be an articulate spokesperson and presenter.
  • Evidence of a strong commitment to diversity and a leadership style that is transparent and inclusive.
  • Thorough understanding of issues facing research libraries including the changing landscape of scholarly communication.
  • Ability to develop creative solutions.
  • Flexibility in accomplishing objectives.
  • Record of sustained professional contribution and engagement.

Salary and Benefits: Commensurate with qualifications and experience. MIT offers excellent benefits including a choice of health and retirement plans, a dental plan, tuition assistance and a relocation allowance. The MIT Libraries afford a flexible and collegial working environment and foster professional growth of staff with management training and travel funding for professional meetings.

Apply online at: http://jobs.mit.edu/. Applications must include cover letter, resume, and contact information for three references. Review of applications will begin March 2, 2015. MIT is strongly and actively committed to diversity within its community and particularly encourages applications from qualified women and minority candidates.

The MIT Libraries support the Institute’s programs of research and study with holdings of more than 2.9 million print volumes and 3.1 million special format items, and terabytes of MIT-owned digital content. In addition, rare special collections, Institute records, historical documents, and papers of noted faculty are held in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Library resources and services are accessible to students and researchers through the Libraries’ website (http://libraries.mit.edu/), and library spaces are widely available for both collaborative work and quiet study. Library resources are supplemented by innovative services for bioinformatics, GIS, metadata, social science and other research data. Through a culture that encourages innovation and collaboration, the MIT Libraries are redefining the role of the 21st century library – making collections more accessible than ever before, and shaping the future of scholarly research. Library staff, at all levels, contribute to this spirit of innovation and to the mission of promoting learning, discovery and the advancement of knowledge at MIT and beyond.

The Libraries maintain memberships and affiliations in ArchivesSpace, arXiv, Association of Research Libraries, the BorrowDirect, Boston Library Consortium, DDI Alliance, DuraSpace, HathiTrust, CLIR/Digital Library Federation, Coalition of Networked Information, Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, EDUCAUSE, National Digital Stewardship Alliance, NISO, North East Research Libraries, OCLC Research Library Partnership, and ORCID. The Libraries utilize Ex Libris’ Aleph for its integrated library system and have recently deployed EBSCO’s Discovery Service. DSpace@MIT, a digital repository developed over the past ten years by the MIT Libraries, serves to capture, preserve and communicate the intellectual output of MIT’s faculty and research community. Other MIT repositories include: Dome, a second DSpace instance, providing access to a sizable image collection and other digital collections owned by the MIT Libraries; the MIT Geodata Repository for a diverse collection of GIS Data; and MIT’s DataVerse for licensed social science datasets.

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