Assistant Head of Resource Acquisitions & Metadata Services for Acquisitions

Department: Resource Acquisitions & Metadata Services Rank and Salary: Associate Librarian to Librarian ($68,085 - $101,535) Position Availability: Immediately Application deadline for first consideration: January 16, 2020   The UCLA Library seeks a dynamic, knowledgeable, user-focused, and collaborative leader to direct on-going services and shape the future of acquisitions and management of print and electronic resources for the UCLA Library.  The Assistant Head of Acquisitions will join the Library during an exciting period of transformation, as we put our strategic plan into action, explore how the acquisitions function can support open access goals, and investigate how the University of California consortia of libraries might implement a systemwide Integrated Library Systems (ILS).   Position Duties Under the general direction of the Head of Resource Acquisitions & Metadata Services, the Assistant Head of Acquisitions collaborates on strategic vision, leadership, and management of all aspects of the UCLA Library’s acquisitions and shared print services.  The Assistant Head leads one of the acquisitions teams and supervises at least one other team leader.   Specific duties and responsibilities include:

• Serves as supervisor of staff employees, including hiring, training, evaluating, mentoring, and developing acquisitions competencies for applicable department staff
• Holds direct responsibility for operations, workflows, and special projects involving ordering, payment, receipt, processing, and access to information resources of all types
• Provides leadership, guidance, and administrative oversight, ensuring compliance with local policy and procedure and professional best practices
• Organizes efforts to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of policies, procedures and workflow for selection, acquisition, processing, bibliographic control, shared print programs, and ensures that workflows are coordinated with other units to ensure effective operations and productivity
• Develops, assesses, and improves purchasing plans, procedures, and relationships with library vendors and shared print collaborators, and provides leadership for the management of established approval plans, Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Programs, and the investigation and evaluation of new acquisitions models
• Fosters effective working relationships with peers, stakeholders, and library partners, and facilitates communication with other units, departments and colleagues, including other technical services staff, Collection Strategies Librarian, and subject specialists and liaisons
• Coordinates UCLA acquisitions activities with the significant amounts of e-resources acquired by the California Digital Library through consortial agreements with other libraries in the University of California system and serves as liaison to CDL’s Journal Archiving Campaigns and to HathiTrust’s Shared Print Program
• Represents UCLA in the development and maintenance of the UC Systemwide Integrated Library System (SILS) in the area of acquisitions
• Participates in the responsible stewardship of the collections budget; develops and enforces responsible fiscal practices; creates, maintains and develops acquisition analysis reports to support and inform collection development and budgetary decisions; follows, understands and enforces University fiscal policies
• Assists with efforts to incorporate technological enhancements; establishes, tracks, and coordinates the various sets of shelf-ready specifications and data loading strategies used with Library materials
• Builds and maintains knowledge of e-resource licensing practices, sufficient to permit problem solving for those performing review and negotiation of licenses
• Explores and pursues means by which acquisitions operations can provide support to open access goals
• Identifies and advocates for, as well as participates in the development of standards needed to support acquisitions work
• Develops and monitors the department’s general assistance budget in support of acquisitions-related work
• Plans and monitors fulfillment of deposit quota in the remote storage facility
• In the absence of the department head, acts as a substitute as needed

  The successful candidate will be committed to promoting and enhancing diversity through engagement with and promotion of the UCLA Principles of Community; possess excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a team environment; and will have excellent analytical, organizational, problem-solving, and time-management skills to effectively balance multiple assignments and projects.   Description of Unit Resource Acquisitions & Metadata Services provides critical support to the education, research, and service mission of UCLA.  The department is part of the Library’s Collection Management & Scholarly Communication division, which includes Preservation, Scholarly Communication, and the Southern Regional Library Facility.  The Library is actively engaged with partners on campus and with other University of California (UC) libraries to provide extensive resources and services to advance information discovery for research, scholarship, and creativity in a dynamically evolving teaching and learning environment.   The Resource Acquisitions & Metadata Services manages the ordering, receiving, and invoicing activities for seven of the UCLA campus libraries and oversees the transportation of materials between 15 campus locations. Each year the department processes approximately 438,000 domestic and international items, representing new titles or added volumes to existing monographic sets and serials.  The expenditures for tangible and online resources are part of a Library materials budget of approximately $13,000,000.  Members of the department advise and consult with members of the campus community and others on acquisition/processing of purchased, licensed, and gift material.  The department is exploring new efficiencies and practices, including a shared approval plan and a broad array of shelf-ready arrangements with various vendors in order to free up staff to take on new roles.  Such potential new roles include tracking and acquiring open access copies of local researchers’ scholarly output.   The department also functions as the main cataloging unit in the UCLA Library system.  It serves the cataloging needs of the Arts, Biomedical, Management, Music, Powell, Science & Engineering, and Young Research Libraries, as well as of eight affiliate libraries on campus.  It is primarily responsible for providing access to more than 90,000 new titles annually, including locally-digitized and curated materials, in various formats and languages, using a variety of metadata schemas.  The department creates metadata in support of UCLA’s Digital Library Program.  Members of the department advise and consult with members of the campus community and others on metadata and cataloging issues.  The department is exploring next generation metadata development through BIBFRAME/linked data and actively participating in national efforts to determine how these changes in data format can improve the user experience and obtain greater benefits from structured metadata investments.  The department is also a long-standing member of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and a significant contributor to BIBCO, CONSER, NACO, and SACO.   The department is comprised of 13 FTE librarians and 32.75 FTE staff.  The management team consists of 9 individuals leading 11 teams: Continuing Resources Management, Data Integrity, Discovery, International Acquisitions & Gifts, International Cataloging, Library Express (LibEx), Metadata Services, Licensing and E-Resources Acquisitions, Monographic Acquisitions, Serials Acquisitions, and Subject Specialists.   The department is committed to a team-based, dynamic, responsive, and customer-focused approach to its work and strives to build a progressive, daring, and innovative culture.   Anyone wishing to be considered for this position should apply here: https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF05186

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