Overview
University of Oklahoma Job Location: Alabama Apply By: Best consideration date for applications: September 15, 2025 Date Created: 09/08/2025
The University of Oklahoma (OU) Libraries seeks an innovative, collaborative, and highly motivated individual to serve as OU’s Institutional Repository Librarian of SHAREOK, the joint institutional repository for OU and the University of Central Oklahoma. SHAREOK is hosted on DSpace, a free, open-source software system by OU Libraries, and it currently contains more than 40,000 items, encompassing faculty and staff publications, student works, and open educational resources. This position develops, implements, and assesses policies, workflows, and documentation to streamline the mediated deposit of faculty, staff, and student scholarship in SHAREOK and improve the user experience, in collaboration with colleagues. Reporting to the Director of Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication within OU Libraries, the Institutional Repository Librarian will be integral to increasing awareness and uptake of SHAREOK in support of the OU-Norman Open Access policy, thereby broadening access to the research output of OU.
The successful candidate will have a strong understanding of copyright and licensing questions related to repository content, demonstrated experience with project management responsibilities related to digital repositories, digital asset management systems, or similar digital initiatives as well as knowledge of the scholarly publishing life cycle. As a member of the librarian classification this position will participate in library services directly related to their domain of expertise such as reference services to library patrons, including answering questions, preparing and maintaining materials, cataloging and classifying material, performing bibliographic searches, developing guides to the Libraries’ collections and research aids, participating in collection development, performing library instruction, promoting and representing the OU Libraries to internal and external clients and performing various duties as needed to successfully fulfill the function of this position.
Best consideration date for applications: September 15, 2025.
Position Responsibilities
- Institutional Repository Responsibilities
- Manage OU internal policies, workflows, and documentation for SHAREOK; conduct quality control checks of procedures to increase efficiency, clarity, and alignment with strategic goals.
- Coordinate audits of existing OU content in SHAREOK; assess current metadata best practices, collaborate with colleagues to create metadata profiles, and lead the development of natural language annotations as appropriate.
- Investigate institutional repositories of peer institutions, to improve the overall usability, discoverability, and interoperability of SHAREOK. Assist in planning, testing, and implementing software updates and development projects.
- Serve as the OU primary point of contact for SHAREOK platform support, liaising with relevant library units to troubleshoot and resolve issues.
- Regularly review and revise public-facing documentation based on user feedback; provide SHAREOK outreach to internal stakeholders and the broader campus community and serve as a resource for copyright and licensing questions related to repository content.
- Maintain in-depth knowledge of repository best practices and current and emerging standards and trends, including but not limited to those from CRL and COAR.
- Analytics and Insights
- Regularly review, compile, and report analytics related to SHAREOK submissions and user traffic.
- Administers data collection, reporting, and notification tools (Google Analytics, etc.) in support of operational awareness of system performance and usage metrics.
- Perform data-driven analysis of systems to drive continuous improvement of accessibility and usability of systems.
- Assist colleagues and partners with metrics reporting and visualization of analysis of systems use and impact.
- Professional Contributions and Activity
- Serve on SHAREOK Consortium groups, committees, and subcommittees as appropriate.
- Maintains up-to-date professional knowledge and contacts in areas related to primary job assignments.
- Participate in library and university committees.
- Serve and participate in professional activities at the local, state, regional, national, and international levels as appropriate to position and experience.
- Publish and present work-related topics and research in areas related to primary job assignments.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Ability to work effectively in a culturally diverse environment.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills, including the ability to effectively communicate with end-users at varying technological skill levels.
- Ability to define and prioritize goals to meet short-term objectives and realize long-term plans.
- Current technology skills including Microsoft Office products (Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint)
- Ability to assess and learn new technologies quickly, work creatively in a rapidly changing environment, and take initiative and be self-directed.
- Ability to speak to fundamental elements of open access in relation to the mission of academic libraries.
- Experience project managing complex digital initiatives projects, including demonstrated experience managing and maintaining short-term and long-term projects.
- Demonstrated success in cultivating and developing collegial relationships with students, faculty, and staff.
- Demonstrated ability to work strategically and collaboratively with stakeholders to build programs and initiatives.
Preferred Qualifications:
- 12 months of recent experience working with institutional repositories or digital asset management systems.
- Master’s degree in Library Science or equivalent from an ALA-accredited program or advanced degree in a relevant field.
- Knowledge of and experience with institutional repositories (e.g. DSpace, Digital Commons, Islandora, Esploro, Dataverse, etc.) digital asset management systems, or related tasks (e.g., creating digital records, quality checking metadata, assessing copyright compliance).
- Understanding of the scholarly publishing lifecycle, including author agreements, open licenses, and publisher self-archiving policies.
- Basic knowledge of relevant metadata schemata (e.g., Dublin Core, MODS, PREMIS) and prior experience with metadata cleanup or standardization projects.
- Experience working in a university setting.
- Demonstrated project management experience.
- Working knowledge of web accessibility best practices and strategies for improving platform usability, discoverability, and/or interoperability.
- Prior experience with providing end user platform support, technical troubleshooting, user testing, and/or platform development.
- Ability to communicate and translate technical processes, metadata standards, and legal terminology to non-specialists.
- Ability to analyze complex problems and formulate strategies to solve them.
- Comfort with quantitative data and analysis.
Applications
All applications must include a cover letter, resume and list of three professional references. Hiring will be contingent upon submission of academic transcripts. Interested individuals may review the full position description at libraries.ou.edu/jobs . To apply for this position, go to https://jobs.ou.edu and search for job number 251897. Best consideration date for applications: September 15, 2025.
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