Position Title:
Vice President for Access and Digital Services
The Linda Hall Library for Science, Engineering and Technology seeks nominees for, or confidential
expressions of interest in, the position of Vice President for Access and Digital Services. Reporting to the
President of the Linda Hall Library, the Vice President for Access and Digital Services provides leadership,
guidance, expertise, and encouragement for a department whose goal is to support a growing research
mission by enabling and enhancing the discovery of and access to collections and resources across
multiple formats at one of the country’s foremost libraries devoted to science, engineering, and
technology.
A member of the Independent Research Libraries Association (IRLA), the Linda Hall Library’s collections
include over half a million monograph volumes, more than 48,000 journal titles, conference
proceedings, reference works, government publications, and technical reports, as well as 200,000
industrial standards and engineering society conference papers. The Library’s history of science
collection, containing printed books from the fifteenth century to the present, is particularly strong in
cosmology, geology, biology, and mathematics. More than 40,000 titles are currently represented,
including a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and important
volumes by Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. The Library has also
recently formed a strategic partnership with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to preserve and
develop historical research collections comprised of American and foreign scientific and technical
publications, and to make the combined 50,000 journal titles available electronically through ondemand digitization and traditional document delivery for the more than 260 CRL-member research
libraries throughout the world.
The Linda Hall Library is on solid financial footing, with an endowment of $211 million and an FY 2015
operating budget of $9.6 million. Nearly $4 million of the annual budget is spent on collections. The
facilities are in good repair, growing to their current size upon completion of an expansion in 2006. The
buildings now comprise 220,000 square feet of library space and include over 32 miles of shelving.
The Position
The Vice President for Access and Digital Services will coordinate the work of the Library’s units
responsible for Technical Services (acquisitions, cataloging and metadata capture); Document Delivery;
Digital Image and Textual Collections; Stacks Management, and Preservation, and will be responsible for
the management, planning, and resource allocation within these units. The Vice President will lead a
staff charged with acquiring, describing, and otherwise providing timely access to the Library’s printbased and digital holdings. She or he will be expected to embrace and implement new modes of
discovery and access that may not currently be in use at the Library and apply these tools and skills in
ways that will reveal the Library’s collections to an increasingly international patron base. Similarly, the
Vice President will provide guidance and coordination with the Library’s units involved in stacks
management, digitization, collection reformatting, repair/restoration, and binding. The Vice President
will oversee 16 full- time and 16 part-time staff positions.
The Vice President will collaborate with the President and other senior staff in advancing and
implementing the Library’s strategic priorities with the primary goal of strengthening the Linda Hall
Library’s stature as a national and international destination for scholarship in science, engineering,
technology, their histories, and related and emerging areas of scholarly inquiry. Among her or his
responsibilities, the Vice President will be asked to:









Lead and coordinate development of strategies that guide the work of the Technical Services,
Document Delivery, Digital Image and Textual Collections, Stacks Management, and
Preservation units.
Review and redesign workflows and work assignments with the goal of increasing efficiencies.
Guide the development and implementation of digital asset management strategies
Oversee, in collaboration with curatorial staff, the creation of digital collections based on the
Library’s significant collections.
Participate in initiatives to identify technological applications that serve and support research
and scholarship within the Library and around the world.
Prepare annual budget recommendations, monitor departmental budget; consult with
colleagues on budgetary matters as needed.
Prepare quarterly, annual, and statistical reports documenting departmental activities; conduct
annual performance appraisals for direct reports.
Participate in senior-level management discussions and decision-making as a member of the
Management Team.
Other duties as required.
QUALIFICATIONS








ALA accredited MLS.
Minimum of 5 years supervisory experience.
Experience in creating and providing access to research and scholarly materials in print and
digital form.
Demonstrated understanding of information technology and contemporary bibliographic
maintenance standards and cataloging rules and guidelines; metadata standards and
applications.
Experience with library vendors and content providers
Demonstrated understanding of preservation methodologies and technologies
Experience with CONTENTdm
Understanding of issues surrounding collecting, hosting, and preserving born-digital materials
For more information, visit www.lindahall.org/employment. To apply please submit an application,
cover letter, resume, references, and several examples from your portfolio to [email protected].
Linda Hall Library is an “Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/V/D.”