Please excuse cross postings.

Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte is accepting applications for our Atkins Fellows summer program. Applications submitted by February 7, 2022 will receive first consideration. These fellowships are designed to give LIS students hands-on experience in an academic library.

The Atkins Fellows program is a ten-week paid summer fellowship for students at the mid-point of their Library, Archives, or Information Science degree program, or those within one year of having completed such a program. The program is designed to provide fellows with a work experience that is focused on professional-level tasks, with high levels of independence and creativity. The three projects proposed for 2022 include library work with digital humanities, open access, and wikidata. Fellows will also have the opportunity to attend workshops, job talks, and conferences, as well as job shadow and participate in library meetings. Through this experience, Fellows will learn about the operations of an academic library, better preparing them for work opportunities in the profession. Participants in this program will receive a $8,000 stipend, paid at an hourly rate ($20/hour, for ten weeks of forty hours per week). This year, we are excited to be able to offer program participants an additional $1500 housing and transportation stipend to help with the cost of moving to Charlotte for the summer.

Want to learn more about the program? Visit our website and watch a recording of a recent informational session hosted by the program coordinator (also accessible from our website).

Please follow us on Twitter @atkinsfellow for program updates, and email the program coordinator, Amanda Binder (abinder3@uncc.edu) with any questions.

About UNC Charlotte and Charlotte, NC

With current enrollment at nearly 30,000, UNC Charlotte is the fastest growing campus in the UNC system, and Charlotte is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. Participating fellows will be able to enjoy an extension to our light rail system that will transport you from the university to many of the most popular neighborhoods in the city. As North Carolina’s urban research university, we provide access to all of the amenities expected of a city, including sports and music venues, museums and galleries, restaurants, coffee shops, and breweries, while still within driving distance to the mountains and the ocean. This is an exciting time to live in Charlotte and work at Atkins Library and we hope you will consider joining us this summer!

Wikidata Fellow - Apply Now

Wikidata, a freely available platform for creating and publishing linked, open data on the web, is increasingly used in academic libraries as an identity management and authority control tool that supplements traditional methods of managing data about people, places, topics, and library collections. Having created thousands of Wikidata items for UNC Charlotte faculty members, electronic theses and dissertations, and local people and places as a participant in the PCC Wikidata Pilot project during 2020-2021, Atkins Library now seeks to integrate Wikidata as an ongoing component of its metadata operations. The Atkins Wikidata Fellow will assist in developing and expanding Atkins Library’s Wikidata program by creating workflows for batch processing of Wikidata, using automated tools to ingest and edit Wikidata, and performing outreach to constituencies within Atkins and beyond who may be interested in contributing to the initiative. The focus of the program will be materials from Special Collections and University Archives and names data.

The Fellow in this position will gain expertise in using this free and open knowledge base that is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in academic libraries, hands-on experience in creating linked data and designing metadata workflows, and familiarity with tools and techniques for batch processing Wikidata. They will also develop an understanding of Wikidata’s relationship to other technical services’ workflows in academic libraries such as metadata creation and authority control, which it supplements and extends. The experience will prepare the Fellow for a variety of positions in cataloging, metadata, digital initiatives, and archives and special collections.

Preferred Education/Training, Experience, Skills/Competencies:

Interest in and experience or coursework in cataloging and metadata, authority control, archives and special collections
Aptitude for finely-detailed work
Ability to learn and use new technologies
Familiarity with spreadsheets, OpenRefine, and scripting languages would be helpful, but training will be offered

Duties and Responsibilities:

Develop, expand, and accelerate Atkins Library’s Wikidata program by creating workflows for batch processing of Wikidata using automated tools such as QuickStatements and OpenRefine to ingest and edit Wikidata and performing outreach to constituencies within Atkins and beyond who may be interested in contributing to the initiative.
Migrate legacy personal and corporate names data to a new locally hosted Wikibase instance and assist partner institutions in contributing their own name data.
Assist with developing a data model for Atkins names and mapping Wikibase properties to standard Wikidata properties.
Experiment with ingesting data into Wikibase with QuickStatements and other tools.
Devise and document workflows and properties for ingesting new data and maintaining/editing data.