Information Resources Specialist Intermediate

Job Summary

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), based at the University of Michigan, is one of the largest archives of digitized social and behavioral health research data. There are thousands of individual data collections (studies) in ICPSR's holdings. They are shared and archived at ICPSR by researchers and funding agencies so that other researchers may download and reuse the data. Do you like the idea of being a data reuse detective--searching scholarly sources to identify when authors utilize data from studies held at ICPSR?  If so, consider joining our team as an Information Resources Specialist Intermediate in ICPSR's Metadata and Preservation unit.

You will work with other team members to add to the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature, a continually growing, searchable database of nearly 120,000 curated publication citations that link ICPSR studies to the citing literature. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, the ICPSR Bibliography is a unique, freely available resource for students, researchers, instructors, librarians, and others who want to find and read the literature in which research data were analyzed. 

Responsibilities

The Information Resources Specialist Intermediate reports to a librarian, who assigns them a portfolio of data studies pertaining to a broad range of fields of research. They are responsible for building the collection of data-related literature for those studies. They also review and collect publications supplied in other ways, including via API queries of large bibliographic corpora, which return potentially viable publications to collect. 

Recognizing meaningful data use requires significant investigative work and expertise in navigating a variety of bibliographic sources and the ICPSR study catalog. The Information Resources Specialist Intermediate gains a deep familiarity with the unique metadata describing each ICPSR study in their assigned portfolio. This is essential for determining which specific study(s) is being used in a given publication, and whether the publication is collectible, according to internal guidelines and standards. They also keep detailed records of their searches, along with notes about key traits in the study metadata, or the idiosyncratic ways in which the data are referred to in the citing literature. 

Having judged a publication to meet ICPSR's collection standards, the Information Resources Specialist Intermediate adds its citation metadata to a database, enhancing it with meaningful indexing and linking metadata. These unique, enhanced records can then be displayed and searched in ICPSR's study catalog, thus providing evidence of data reuse, as well as valuable metadata to support data discovery.

Further, the Information Resources Specialist utilizes the ICPSR Bibliography as a source of information, itself, about the trends and practices surrounding data reuse and data citation. With this knowledge, they are able to participate in research and to help create Bibliography-specific resources for instruction and outreach.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in the social sciences or information/library science.
• Significant experience constructing queries in scholarly literature databases and other authoritative sources.
• Good understanding of the terminology associated with methodologies and practices in the social sciences and behavioral health sciences.
• Experience evaluating scholarly literature for specific information.
• Experience performing accurate data entry and using spreadsheet software.
• Demonstrated productivity while working independently.
• Excellent English-language reading and writing skills.
• Highly-focused, organized, and detail-oriented.

Desired Qualifications

• Master's degree in a social science, information/library science, or relevant field
• Working knowledge of citation management software
• Experience using SQL and Python