Beyond the Job Title: Cataloging Systems and Linked Data Strategist

A library tech job interview with Ruth Kitchin Tillman

Posted on July 21, 2025 in Job Profiles

Authors:

Ruth Kitchin Tillman
A librarian learning about the Cataloguing Systems Linked Data Strategist job position

Core to LibTech Insights’s mission is demystifying the broad and dynamic field of tech librarianship in higher ed. In this series, we interview a librarian every month to learn a little more about their position. As library tech jobs proliferate, they sometimes come with unfamiliar, jargony, or intimidating titles. We want to go beyond the title and look at the responsibilities, skills, and joys that make up the job. We hope this series will increase your knowledge of library tech jobs and skills and offer you greater insight into the working lives of your colleagues.

For this installment, we spoke to Ruth Kitchin Tillman to learn more about her job as a Cataloging Systems and Linked Data Strategist. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

What is your job title and responsibilities?

My job title is Cataloging Systems and Linked Data Strategist. I work in the Cataloging & Metadata Services Department at Penn State Libraries. What I do day-to-day can vary a lot, but it has a lot in common with a systems librarian or a discovery librarian. I am the product owner for our local Blacklight catalog and Summon discovery platform, I do a lot of troubleshooting across systems, I get catalog data for people—that kind of thing. My favorite days are ones where I get to spin up a Python or bash script to do a really complicated query or transform existing data.

When I was hired in 2017, the administration hoped I’d be able to help the department transition to BIBFRAME in the next couple years. So that’s where the “Linked Data Strategist” part comes from. Of course, that hasn’t happened, and our department isn’t eager to be cutting-edge BIBFRAME adopters. I’ve leaned into the systems side of things. I am not one of the primary managers of our the ILS, but I am part of the bigger team that works with it. I’m now leading our RFP for a Library Services Platform, and I anticipate my role will continue to evolve in a more traditional systems direction over time.

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Can you describe your career trajectory leading up to this position? 

My plan was to be an archivist, but I couldn’t find a permanent job. Since I had put a lot of work into understanding Encoded Archival Description, I decided to look for broader metadata work. I ended up in the worlds of institutional repositories and digital collections, first at NASA Goddard and then at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame in particular, the job involved a lot of work as a product owner, writing specifications and talking with the developers about code. 

I realized that I actually enjoyed designing interfaces and working with existing metadata in bulk a lot more than I did the day-to-day of creating the metadata themselves. I also wanted to work in systems that were a bit more established than the ever-churning world of repositories. This position seemed like a great opportunity to lead projects, making better use of existing systems.

I used to say that I would never go into systems-type work because so much of what you can do depends on the vendors, but I have found it really meaningful to work on things that get a lot of use, whether by our patrons or my coworkers. I am also extremely fortunate to be at an institution that’s well-resourced enough to improve on those existing vendor systems.

Can you give an example of a project you’ve worked on in this position? 

My absolute favorite project was one of the things that attracted me to this role—I got to lead the project to spin up a Blacklight catalog. But to be more concrete, we recently did a project to integrate ILL requests in the catalog. We had turned off recalls in 2020, so if material was unavailable, we were displaying separate links sending the patron to ILLiad. Our question was: “When a patron clicks the ‘I Want It’ button in the catalog, can we have the system identify whether a hold can be placed on a local copy and, if not, place an ILLiad request for them?”

Working with ILL staff, systems admins, and the developers, I developed logic to identify conditions that both the materials and the patron needed to meet to be eligible for ILL. We used our system APIs, ILLiad APIs, and logic tables in Blacklight. I then had to update about 600,000 MARC records where the ISBN subfield $a contained information that would break ILLiad’s automated processes. I worked for about a month moving it to subfield $q. Now, patrons can press just one button to place a hold. They can seamlessly place an ILL request if the material isn’t available locally or choose a non-recalling hold if they’d prefer not to use ILL. It’s such a satisfying payoff.

You mentioned earlier that you anticipate your role evolving in a more systems direction. But to take a step back, what do you see for the future of this field?

That’s a good question. I think we will always be seeking a balance between figuring out how to make systems talk to each other, customizing commercial things to fit our local needs, and developing local or open solutions at a small or medium scale. I want to believe that we can do big fully-open/no-vendors-involved things, but where I actually see that working is more in projects at the scale of Blacklight versus an ILS. (I think FOLIO owes its viability to EBSCO and IndexData working on it, though I see and respect the amount of work library folks put into it.)

Is “I believe we can do medium-sized things” a limiting vision? I don’t know. But I see a lot of value in those medium-sized things, and I hope library workers keep making them.

What is advice you’d give to students in library school who are interested in pursuing a similar career path to yours?

Experiment, learn, and share what you know. If you understand part of the problem, like library data, and you learn to write clear specifications and documentation, you can have great collaborations with programmers. Even if you don’t start out with a technical background, you can learn a lot of little things over time. Take workshops, follow tutorials, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and don’t worry if your end results aren’t some big, fancy project.

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