Beyond the Job Title: Digital Preservation Librarian

A library tech job interview with Grayson Murphy

Posted on October 16, 2024 in Job Profiles

Authors:

Grayson Murphy
A librarian learning more about digital preservation librarian jobs

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 this installment, we spoke to Grayson Murphy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to learn more about his job as a Digital Preservation Librarian. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

What is your job title and responsibilities?

My title is Digital Preservation Librarian, and I work in the Digital Services Department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Libraries. It is my job to ensure the long-term access and usability of UAB Libraries’ curated digital assets, which currently consist of content from our digital special collections and our institutional repository. I handle digitized print material and born-digital material (i.e., materials originally created in the digital medium). My job spans the nitty-gritty (using command line file conversion tools such as ffmpeg and scripting workflow automations) to the big picture (consulting on projects, crafting policy, and drafting long-term plans for growth). I also keep track of the various parts of our digital preservation infrastructure and ensure content is ingested into our preservation systems.

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

This is my first position after graduate school. I graduated from Indiana University – Bloomington with a dual Master of Library Science and Master of Information Science in 2022.

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

A recent project I completed was the appraisal, organization, and preservation of UAB Libraries’ legacy digital collections. (They are “legacy” because they were created before the existence of my department and our preservation program.) This content, spanning 15 years of work, included over 30 digital collections and thousands of objects. When I was hired, the content was living on an at-risk and aging storage server. I systematically went through every collection, matching each object on the server to its counterpart on our access platform (which was CONTENTdm at the time) and assigning them matching IDs as I went. I then identified the best file formats for preservation (e.g., TIFFs for images over JPEGs) for each object and packaged the content for ingest into our preservation systems.

What’s something you’d tell students in library school programs who are interested in pursuing a career in digital preservation?

The first and most obvious piece of advice is to take coursework in the realm of archives and digital preservation. Not all programs have courses explicitly on digital preservation, so if that’s the case, then seek out any digital/systems/IT-related courses available to shore up your digital skills.

Additionally, many courses focus heavily on theory (which is important!), so try to get as much hands-on experience with different digital preservation tools as possible while you’re in library school, either through student jobs, internships, or on your own time. This is because many practitioners enter the field knowing the what and the why of digital preservation work, but not the how (I certainly felt this way!).

What is the most gratifying part of your job?

Since I am the first person in my role, the most gratifying part of my job is contributing to building a digital preservation program from the ground up and knowing that I am laying the groundwork for future practitioners to do this work here in the years to come.  

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