Beyond the Job Title: Digital Curation Librarian

A library tech job interview with Matt Sherman

Posted on June 12, 2024 in Job Profiles

Authors:

Matt Sherman
A tech librarian looking up digital curation librarian

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 out there and offer you greater insight into the working lives of your colleagues.

For our third installment, we spoke to Matt Sherman at Drexel University to learn more about his job as a Digital Curation Librarian. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

What is your job title and responsibilities? 

I am the Digital Curation Librarian at the Drexel University Libraries. At a high level, it means that I manage the digital and digitized records of the University. Practically, it entails managing our digital collections system, our born-digital archival records, and our digital preservation systems and processes.

Part of the time I also have more traditional subject librarian responsibilities and provide reference, instruction, and liaison support to Drexel’s humanities and social sciences programs.

Where does a Digital Curation Librarian fit into the ecosystem of your library and the institution? 

At Drexel, the Digital Curation Librarian position is part of the University Archives team and focuses on supporting the preservation and access of digital archival and cultural heritage materials. Although I’m part of the University Archives team, I frequently interact with the Library Integrated Technology Systems department and the Metadata Services department. Also, because of the archival nature of the materials, I interact with various departments and organizations across campus as archival needs arise. 

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Have you needed to develop any specialized tech skills, coding languages, and/or software knowledge? How or when in your career did you develop them? 

Working in the Digital Curation Librarian role tends to require an eclectic set of skills and knowledge since it is a combination of working on digital archives and digital collections. For the digital collections aspect of my job, knowing metadata and XML is important. That’s something I learned in library school, though I started getting exposed to it during a work study job in undergrad.  

Understanding digital asset management systems in general—and the particular digital collections system your institution uses—is also important. I have picked up different systems at various times, going back to learning Mambo CMS for a class in undergrad, then adding digitized materials to the custom digital collection system at the Wisconsin State Historical Society during my work study job.

Throughout my career, I’ve had to learn how to use ContentDM, DSpace, Digital Commons, and Alma-Digital. Each of them, paired with my knowledge of HTML and web design, have built on each other to enable me to decipher new systems quickly and figure out the best way to add and organize the content we are sharing in them in the most user-friendly way possible. Also, my training in scanning at the Wisconsin State Historical society has been incredibly helpful in teaching and guiding student workers in our digitization projects. 

For the digital archives side, I have had to quickly learn a lot about digital preservation, such as what is the best file format to use and what are the best tools to support long-term digital preservation. I had some exposure to this in library school and interning at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Archives, as well as a lifetime of using computers to know about a wide array of file and media formats, but a lot of these skills and tools I have had to learn on the job. I have found that across multiple positions, even bits of knowledge of coding, scripting, and regular expressions end up being very useful in ways you never expect. 

Can you give us an example of a project you’ve worked on?

Last year, we needed to migrate around 2,000 scans of Drexel’s student newspaper, The Triangle, from an aging and unsupported custom-made digital collection system to a newer, vendor-hosted system called Alma-Digital. Unfortunately, this was not as simple as moving files between the two systems. We needed the help of the Libraries’ Integrated Technology Systems team to get the files and data out of the old system. Then we needed to create a lot of new descriptive metadata for all of the issues quickly, using some of the existing data and software tools. Finally, we needed to upload all of that in batches to Alma-Digital. The upload process ran into some strange problems that required us to reach out to colleagues at other libraries to troubleshoot, but we were able to find a work-around. With this project, we also had a great opportunity to work with the existing Triangle student editors to add an additional ten years of issues to the digital collection, and now we have an incredibly robust collection of nearly a century of The Triangle publicly accessible online.

What do you enjoy most about this position?

I really enjoy working with a diversity of interesting materials that have limited visibility, helping to preserve them for future researchers and patrons and making them available to as wide of a range of people through the internet as possible. It is what drew me to the field and, along with an excellent team of incredibly friendly coworkers, is what keeps me working here.

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