New York University (NYU) is a private research university located in New York City and is the largest private university in the United States. Total student enrollment at NYU as of fall 2022 was 61,724, with 29,401 undergraduates, 29,743 graduate and professional students, and 2,636 noncredit program students. The student-to-faculty ratio is 9:1.
Since 2019, the New York University Libraries’ top priority has been to increase diversity and equity within the organization, as well as to improve the sense of inclusion and belonging among NYU’s students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members.
With this commitment at the forefront of its hiring efforts, NYU Libraries has been participating in the NYU Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative to recruit and support new library employees in five themed areas. After the completion of the hiring cluster that began posting positions in the fall 2021 and will post its final position in fall 2023, 17 new positions will have been filled. These positions and themes, as shown below, are directly tied to community impact and public good and are inflected halfway between research and practice.
Building upon and extending the liaison model of librarianship, many of these positions will work within library services and collections in new ways to engage the community and advance open scholarship and research practices and collections. Given that the library cluster hires tie back to the larger university initiative, internal and cross-campus affinity groups will be created to build community and facilitate communication among groups. Importantly, these cluster hires make tangible NYU Libraries’ commitment to increasing diversity and equity within its ranks.
These cluster descriptions were shaped and developed through an iterative process of engagement with the broader NYU-library community. A small team in the library drafted the first themes and descriptions, which were then reviewed and refined by a broader group of library employees.
Faculty Cluster Hire Themes
Centering Underrepresented Voices: Anti-racist Practices in Libraries and Archives
The Centering Underrepresented Voices: Anti-racist Practices in Libraries and Archives cluster within the Division of Libraries will both extend and strengthen the Division of Libraries’ commitment to the core values of Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Accessibility (IDBEA). The positions in the cluster are strategically placed in three core areas of librarianship: collections and subject expertise, description and discovery, and engagement and outreach. The cluster will center underrepresented communities’ voices by bringing in new collections, highlighting emerging streaming media collections, and creating anti-racist description practices.
Building STEM for the Public Good: Cultivating Openness in the Sciences
The Building STEM for the Public Good cluster will bring together hires to advance NYU Libraries’ goals around openness and spearhead its participation in the public interest technology initiatives at New York University. The positions in this cluster build on a rich tradition of libraries centering the public good in technology development, selection, policy, and implementation, not only to facilitate access to a range of technologies, but also to bring a critical lens to their inherent limitations and biases.
Health and Scientific Literacy, Openness, and Equity
The Health and Scientific Literacy, Openness, and Equity cluster lies at the intersection of information science, health and scientific literacy, and social justice. The three positions in this cluster will focus on equity within scientific information culture writ large, and support NYU research and curricular needs in the basic and health sciences, with an emphasis on equity, information literacy, and open scholarship.
The Politics of Space: Data, the City, and Structures of Inequality
The three positions that comprise the Politics of Space: Data, the City, and Structures of Inequality cluster will enhance university-wide engagement with urban informatics and data literacy, which are essential to understanding how cities operate, change, and thrive. Cities are a register of deep-seated social inequality, often understood through quantitative data analysis and data visualization. NYU Libraries’ Politics of Space cluster looks outward and imagines expanded capacity for urban economics and education disciplines, moored by holistic support for data analysis and visualization across the disciplines at NYU.
Transformative Humanities for All: Building & Sharing the Cultural Record
The Transformative Humanities for All cluster will enhance NYU Libraries’ capabilities to support academic and nonacademic knowledge production in the humanities and related disciplines at NYU and beyond. It seeks to build and enhance a set of key knowledge, descriptive, curatorial, and technical services to support and promulgate research and inquiry that centers diverse and underrepresented voices in the humanistic and performing arts spheres and leads the libraries’ strategic contributions to the work of the emerging field of public humanities.
For additional information about Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship, please read the ARL report or view additional institutional profiles.
