University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
NOTE: All postdoctoral fellowship positions are contingent upon funding. Applications are accepted via CLIR's online application system. Review of applications is already underway, but applications will be accepted until all positions are filled.
UCLA Library CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship 2013-2014: Digitizing Middle Eastern Ephemera
The UCLA Library offers a one year opportunity for a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, with possible renewal for one year, to join a new collaborative project team: the Digitizing Ephemera Program (DEP). This is the first of a multi-year effort specifically focused on Middle Eastern ephemeral materials. In the first year, emphasis will be on Hebrew language ephemera.
The CLIR Fellow will participate in activities related to identifying, collecting, organizing, describing, preserving, and digitizing at-risk Middle Eastern ephemeral materials. These are items that will build on UCLA’s world class collections relating to the Middle East and its peoples and cultures. Using subject and language expertise, the CLIR Fellow will also help to build a model of collaboration to use with international partner institutions in order to develop and share mirror sites of digitized ephemeral materials.
Required:
Fluent reading and writing knowledge of Hebrew.
Subject expertise highlighting cultural, historical, political, and related knowledge of the Middle East, especially Israel.
Preferred:
Experience working with digitized collections, especially experience in preparing collections for digitization, digitizing collections, and resolving issues with metadata and searching in digitized collections.
Fluent Hebrew speaking, reading, and writing knowledge.
Fluent reading and writing knowledge of Arabic.
Fluent reading and writing knowledge of other modern or classical languages used in the Middle East, especially when they are closely related to materials associated with communities where Hebrew is a major language.
About UCLA and the UCLA Library:
UCLA is one of the leading public research universities in the United States. It ranks among the nation’s top five institutions in research funding. UCLA is one of the top 10 universities in the country in the number of doctoral degrees it awards each year, and among the top 25 for professional degrees. The university includes more than 100 separate academic programs and 11 professional schools.
Ranked among the top 10 academic research libraries in North America, the UCLA Library houses one of the most comprehensive and highly used collections in the world, with more than 9 million volumes, tens of thousands of serial subscriptions, and extensive online academic resources to which the library subscribes for the benefit of the university community. UCLA students have access to the holdings of all of the University of California libraries, which are collectively second in size only to those of the Library of Congress.
The UCLA Library’s extensive Digital Library Program (DLP) serves as the catalyst for the creation, management, and delivery of digital content in support of the UCLA Library’s mission and goals (http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/2627.cfm). The DLP provides for the storage and dissemination of digital objects, including text, images, audio, data files, and video in their various digital manifestations and combinations. The UCLA Library provides a web presence for digital collections and provides storage, backup, and digital preservation support for all digital content accepted into, or developed by, the library. The DLP grows in scope daily and currently includes approximately 735,000 digital objects.
By definition, ephemera constitute a special collection. UCLA’s Library Special Collections (LSC) is recognized internationally as being one of the largest and most distinguished repositories in the United States for archival collections, rare books and manuscripts, historic photographs, audiovisual materials, maps, oral histories, ephemera, and other types of special research materials (http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special.cfm). It includes the notable Center for Oral History (http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu), the collections of which include testimonies of immigrant and ethnic populations in Los Angeles.
UCLA’s LSC includes extensive collections supporting area studies and international development. It is noted for materials relating to Africa, the Middle East and Judaica, South America, and Asia. These area studies special collections are managed by subject and language specialists. The Asia collections are complemented by rare Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language materials managed by specialists in the East Asian Library, the tenth largest in the United States (http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/eastasian/library-collections). The DEP will be situated amongst important and complementary resources, facilitating international global scholarship. The DEP will also serve as a foundational collection in terms of our building future resources in related areas.