Dean and University Librarian, J. Willard Marriott Library Profile
Dean and University Librarian, J. Willard Marriott Library Profile.pdf (print friendly)About the U
The University of Utah, located in Salt Lake City in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, is the flagship institution of higher learning in Utah. Founded in 1850, it serves over 25,000 undergraduate students and over 7,500 graduate students from across the U.S. and the world. With over 72 major subjects at the undergraduate level and more than 90 major fields of study at the graduate level, including law and medicine, the University prepares students to live and compete in the global workplace. Known for its proximity to seven world-class ski resorts within 40 minutes of campus, the U encourages an active, holistic lifestyle, innovation and collaborative thinking to engage students, faculty and business leaders.
Strategic Plan
The University of Utah’s Strategic Plan June 2012 outlines seven core commitments, including Student Success and Engagement, Research and Teaching Excellence, Diversity, the Pursuit and Practice of Sustainability, a Collective Global Vision and Strategy, Building Community, and a Broadened Sense of Leadership. The Marriott Library is actively engaged in responding to these core commitments through its many programs and services.
Presidential Priorities
David W. Pershing was officially inaugurated October 25th 2012 as the 15th president of the University of Utah. In his inaugural address, President Pershing emphasized student success and engagement and encouraged University employees to maintain and provide additional transformative experiences for students while building on success in the areas of research, innovation, and athletics.
Imagine U
On January 1, 2013, the University of Utah launched a new institutional marketing campaign, Imagine U. The campaign is the culmination of a year of research, which included surveys and focus groups to determine the right message to describe the creativity and innovation of students and employees at the University. There are six Key Supporting Messages:
The University of Utah
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Is a tier one teaching and research institution.
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Offers an extraordinary collaborative learning experience.
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Combines the energy of a world-class research institution and a cutting-edge science center.
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Prepares graduates to enter a competitive workforce.
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Offers a unique and inspiring environment to work and play.
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Is engaged with the community where we live and work.
Technology and Commercialization
The University of Utah is top in the country for creating start-up companies from University research, according to a ranking by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).
Forbes magazine’s recent ranking of the “Best States for Business” pointed to “an educated labor force” as a big reason Utah came in at number one. The U supplies many of the employees for companies that keep expanding their operations in Utah, such as Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Omniture, Oracle, Ebay and many others.
Commitment to Diversity
The University of Utah is deeply committed to enhancing the success of diverse faculty, students, and staff, as part of our broader goal to enrich the educational experiences and success of all members of our University community. The campus offers services to support our diverse faculty, staff, and student body through the Women’s Resource Center, LGBT Resource Center, American Indian Resource Center, Center for Ethnic Student Affairs, International Center, Center for Disability Services, and Veterans’ Support Center. Curriculum offerings encourage students to engage in a broader world-view through courses and programs such as Diversity Scholars, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and an ever growing Language and Literatures Department, which teaches over 20 different languages.
Sustainability
The University of Utah has a plan to be carbon neutral by 2050. In fall 2010, the University released its Energy and Environmental Stewardship Initiative: 2010 Climate Action Plan detailing our long-range plans to make the campus even more environmentally friendly. In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently ranked the University of Utah fourth in the nation for green power purchases.
Healthcare
University of Utah Health Care was recently ranked first in the nation in a prestigious national study. The University Health System Consortium’s 2010 Quality and Accountability Study compared 98 of the nation’s top academic medical centers and ranked them based on core quality measures, patient safety indicators, mortality rates, re-admission rates, and patient satisfaction scores.
Location
Salt Lake City is home to a population of 189,000, while the greater Salt Lake metropolitan area has a population of more than 1,145,000. Here can be found a rich and diverse set of recreational and cultural activities. As well as boasting quick access to numerous year-round outdoor activities and natural beauty, the city is full of opportunities for cultural and social engagement. A short overview of the city’s offerings reveals more than ten museums, dozens of art galleries and a monthly gallery stroll, the Utah Symphony – Utah Opera, multiple professional theatre and dance companies, an active music scene, and a host of cultural and arts festivals. Sports fans will find professional basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer teams.
Salt Lake City boasts a number of public transportation options. Built in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the TRAX light rail system serves the entire Salt Lake valley, with a line to the airport opening in April 2013. Utah Transit Authority (UTA) bus routes are especially plentiful to the University and run frequently. In winter, routes are added to deliver skiers and snowboarders to seven resorts. FrontRunner, a commuter rail service, recently completed its 89-mile link between Salt Lake City and the metropolitan areas of Ogden to the north and Provo to the south. University of Utah employees can use their UCards to ride on all three systems for free, which makes commuting to campus an easy, inexpensive option. Additionally, bikes are allowed on all buses and trains, and bike lanes and trails are being added every year throughout the city, resulting in the League of American Bicyclists naming Salt Lake City as a Silver-level Bicycle Friendly Community.
There are a wide variety of restaurant offerings in Salt Lake City and nearby suburbs including excellent international cuisine. Some local favorites include the Red Iguana (Mexican), Bombay House (Indian), Bambara (American), Café Molise, Squatters Brew Pub, Takashi (Sushi), Siegfried’s Deli, Copper Onion (European) and Eba (Tapas) just to name a few.
Utah is home to five national parks and many National Monuments and National Forests all of which are within driving distance of Salt Lake City. Neighboring states offer access to Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and the Grand Canyon. Local ski resorts have excellent downhill and cross country skiing, snowshoe and snowboarding options.
All of these many cultural and recreational activities, combined with the unrivaled beauty of Utah’s outdoors, make Salt Lake City an amazing place to live.
The Marriott Library
History
The current facility for the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library was constructed and opened in 1968. At that time, the library housed over one million volumes and provided seating for three thousand students. Wallace Stegner, who was a distinguished alumnus and former professor of the University of Utah and who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, provided the keynote address for the dedication of the Marriott Library on May 18, 1968.
In 1969, the University Library was named in honor of J. Willard Marriott, Sr., who contributed $1 million for library collections. J. Willard and his wife, Alice Sheets Marriott, were both alumni of the University. Mr. Marriott delivered a brief speech to rededicate the building on August 16, 1969.
In 1996, the Marriott Library was expanded from 278,000 square feet to 488,000 square feet. The new space contained over thirty-two miles of shelving and a large multimedia center. The building was rededicated on October 2, 1996. Dr. Karen Lawrence, then a professor of English at the University who became president of Sarah Lawrence College in 2007, was the keynote speaker.
In 2000, the Marriott Library commenced the multimillion-dollar Renovation-Innovation Capital Campaign to fund major building-wide renovations. Renovation began June 1, 2005 and concluded June 30, 2009. The building remained open to patrons throughout the entire project. The 2009 renovation increased interior space within the library to 516,000 net square feet.
A rededication ceremony for the renovated Marriott Library was held October 26, 2009. The program included a keynote address by Former First Lady Laura W. Bush and comments by J. Willard Marriott, Jr., Chairman and CEO of Marriott International. In the years since the rededication additional improvements have been added—most notably the spacious Faculty Center, which opened in January 2013. Located on the ground floor of the library next to the increasingly popular Mom’s Café, the Faculty Center includes the Digital Scholarship Lab, Teaching and Learning Technologies, and the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence. The center houses state of the art audio and video studios, and a number of well-equipped teaching and learning spaces.
Librarians and Staff
The many successes of the Marriott Library are a reflection of a talented and high achieving group of librarians and staff committed to providing the best services possible.
The recent substantial renovation of the Marriott Library spurred a significant reorganization of Library units to support librarians and staff moving beyond traditional library roles to incorporate new ways of supporting research and learning on the UofU campus. This included the dismantling of a variety of subject-based service desks and bringing them together with a computer lab into one location, the Knowledge Commons, which offers both research and technology support for students, faculty and staff who use the more than 250 computers, scanners, and other equipment. Subject-focused teams concentrate on increasing outreach to campus departments, institutes, and centers along with collecting, archiving, and providing access to digital and print collections.
In addition to the Digital Scholarship Lab and the Knowledge Commons, described above, the renovation included the addition of a state-of-the-art Automated Retrieval Center (ARC), a 3-stories high storage facility with a capacity of approximately 2 million items. This has allowed the Library to make space for other services and collections and adjust to changing needs of our diverse user population. Robots are used to retrieve and shelve materials stored in the ARC and there are approximately 150 ARC requests per day.
The Marriott Library is dedicated to the cycle of publishing from idea to finished product. A Copyright Librarian assists faculty with the complicated world of copyright, open access, and Creative Commons. The University of Utah Press is organizationally part of the Marriott Library and has published many award-winning books, especially in the areas of anthropology and archaeology, Mormon Studies and autobiography/memoir. The Library’s Book Arts Program is a highly successful education and outreach program that serves K-12 students, educators, university students, and academic researchers through presentations, classes, and workshops that teach the art of handmade books. The Marriott Library Special Collections has a significant and internationally known collection of digital photos, video, and audio materials along with a nationally recognized collection of manuscripts. An institutional repository, USpace, was created in 2005 and hosts faculty pre-prints, graduate student theses, and poster presentations. A number of open access online journals have been created in partnership with campus faculty. Finally, the Espresso Book Machine allows anyone in the campus and local community the potential of self-publishing as well as printing books published before 1923, many of which can be found using the Hathi Trust database.
This reorganization allowed for a variety of behind-the-scenes changes as well. A digitization department was created with high-end equipment that provides an automated way to digitize even fragile materials. This became the primary unit that created the many digital collections to which our patrons have access. Our cataloging department has adjusted practices to provide metadata for these digital collections. Collection development shifted focus from librarian-centric to an innovative patron-directed acquisition program. While our librarians still select some materials, our faculty make many more recommendations and acquisitions are primarily electronic. The development of these new collection models allows the Library to integrate electronic resources with traditional library collections and services while incorporating new technologies and formats. Through a combination of patron-directed acquisitions, scrutiny and modification of our internal processes, we have streamlined access, shortened the time it takes to get people what they need for their research, and ultimately made our collections vital to the research and teaching mission of the University.
There are a total of 46 faculty librarians and 139 full-time staff who comprise the employees of the Marriott Library along with 165 part-time employees. The Marriott Library has a dedication to student success and engagement and thus hosts internships in collaboration with My University Signature Experience (MUSE) along with Library and Information Schools across the country. The Marriott Library continues to reshape its service models and infrastructure to best fit the changing needs of users. Investment in librarians and staff through professional development activities has enabled them to actively engage, remain agile, and contribute expertise to the campus and broader academic community.
The University seeks a Dean and University Librarian of the Marriott Library who will work effectively within this value system, providing support for the continuing professional development of librarians and staff, fostering collaboration within the Library and across the University, and developing the diversity of its employees.
Development
An External Relations unit within the Marriott Library strengthens the Library’s fund-raising capacity. Such support has already proved significant enabling the creation of the Katherine W. Dumke Fine Arts & Architecture Library, the Frances Hoopes Seminar Room, and the Gould Auditorium, to name a few.
The university seeks someone who is comfortable and experienced in engaging with potential donors and who is willing and able to seek funds to support the mission of the Marriott Library.
Student Engagement and Library Partners
The Marriott Library is inspired and invigorated by President Pershing's vision of student success and engagement. We have already built a powerful reputation for student-centered service on campus, as evidenced by the ever-growing use of our library, the study and collaboration spaces full to bursting, and our status as the preferred spot for students to meet and work. We constantly improve our programs, optimize our spaces, and adjust our policies to improve the student experience.
Several campus partners have office space in the Library to capitalize on student services that are complementary to our own and provide one-stop shopping experience for the many students who visit the Library throughout the year. These partners include College Advising, the Writing Center, the Student Success and Engagement Initiative, My University Signature Experience (MUSE), the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) and Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT).
Our partnerships with campus programs demonstrate both our eagerness to advance student success and our capacity to do so. At the same time, we continue to provide first-rate services and a growing complement of excellent scholarly resources to university teaching and research faculty.
Other Campus Libraries
The J. Willard Marriott Library is joined on the University of Utah campus by three other independent libraries: the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, the S.J. Quinney Law Library, and the McKay Music Library. Several collaborative efforts exist between the Libraries including one integrated online catalog and several teams focused on Innovation, Consumer Health, and eResearch.
The University seeks a candidate who is able to sustain and increase these and other collaborative campus efforts.
Consortial Memberships
The University of Utah has long standing relationships with library consortia, which allow for cooperative resource purchasing and sharing. For more than four decades we have been part of the Utah Academic Library Consortium, home to the Mountain West Digital Library, a central search portal for digital collections about the Mountain West region. We are also part of the Greater Western Library Alliance, a consortium of 32 research libraries in the Western and Central United States.
Greening the Library
The library provides the perfect arena to test out new ideas, gauge attitudes, and educate for sustainability. Since 2008, the Marriott Library has implemented a large number of green initiatives and become the model for green teams across the University of Utah campus. These initiatives have ranged from participating in the creation of the University’s climate action plan and piloting a campus green team expansion program, to providing student internships and implementing an expanded recycling and waste reduction program within the library.
The Strategic Plan and Organizational Chart offer more information about the library.
Dean and University Librarian, J. Willard Marriott Library
The University of Utah invites nominations and applications for the position of Dean and University Librarian of the J. Willard Marriott Library.
The J. Willard Marriott Library inspires the creation, discovery, and use of knowledge for Utah and the world. As the centerpiece of the campus community, the Marriott Library is committed to innovative implementation and use of cutting-edge technology for purposes of instruction, scholarly communication, collaboration, outreach, and accessibility. Our spacious and bright building has been renovated to include technology-enabled classrooms, computer labs and technical support operations, and open study space optimized for group collaboration. Additionally, the Marriott Library’s Special Collections is home to one of the top rare book collections west of the Mississippi, a world class Book Arts Program, The University of Utah Press, and more. The Marriott Library also houses the recently created Faculty Center, which provides assistance to the academic community working with digital scholarship and technology-rich research as well as assistance with updating teaching methods to suit the fast-paced changes occurring in higher education.
With the addition of the Faculty Center, updated classrooms, and support for campus IT initiatives, the Marriott Library has a well-established record of enhancing information access using digital technologies such as our leadership with the development of many digital collections and the early adoption of an institutional repository, USpace. The University of Utah has long standing relationships and leadership with library consortia, which allow for cooperative resource purchasing and sharing including the Greater Western Library Alliance, a consortium of 32 research libraries in the Western and Central United States. For more than four decades we have been the financial administrator of the Utah Academic Library Consortium, and a leader in developing and housing the Mountain West Digital Library, a central search portal for digital collections about the Mountain West region.
We have also maintained a focus on collaboration with campus entities to ensure students, staff, and faculty have access to the resources they need to accomplish their academic goals including an innovative patron driven acquisition program. The ideal candidate will have experience in identifying and promoting trends in the academic library community that impact the way that patrons interact with library collections, resources, and spaces.
The successful candidate for this position should have leadership experience in academic libraries and scholarly communities as well as an established record of accomplishment in the planning and development of a large organization. A capacity for developing and sustaining relationships with administrators, deans, faculty, staff, donors, and students is essential, as is the ability to represent the University effectively for purposes of outreach, development, and collaboration. The Marriott Library provides a broad set of services to a large community, so a candidate who demonstrates a commitment to supporting a diverse student, staff, and faculty body is critical.
Qualifications
The University desires that the successful candidate will bring:
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Leadership experience in the academic and national scholarly communities. A proven capacity to develop and sustain relationships and collaborative ventures with administrators, deans, faculty, staff, and students;
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Public presence and the ability to represent the University effectively for purposes of outreach, development, and inter-institutional cooperation;
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Knowledge of emerging digital technologies and their potential within the domains of scholarship and scholarly communication;
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An understanding of the major challenges facing academic research libraries, such as collection development, technology integration, space planning and utilization, and the need for effective staff and organizational development to support rapidly changing user needs and expectations;
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Proven managerial ability in a complex organizational setting, including the capable management of fiscal, human, and physical resources;
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Eagerness and ability to work with a capable and accomplished Marriott Library Executive Council and maintain the collaborative tone and environment;
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Demonstrated ability to collaborate with a diverse constituency of faculty, students, and staff to understand their specific concerns, recognize their common grounds, and realize their shared and distinct goals;
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A successful history of staff development and team building, including a demonstrated commitment to building and supporting a diverse staff;
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The ability and willingness to seek out and obtain resources for the development of the Marriott Library;
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Academic credentials appropriate to the leadership of a large, modern academic library. A Masters in Library Science from an ALA-accredited program or equivalent is required. A second masters and/or a doctoral or equivalent terminal degree are desirable.
The Dean and University Librarian of the J. Willard Marriott Library is appointed by and reports to the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.
Benefits and Salary
The University of Utah offers an excellent benefits package including TIAA-CREF, medical, dental, generous paid sick and vacation accrual, sabbaticals, professional development time.
Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience.
To Apply
The position will remain open until filled. Initial review of the candidates is on-going.
Please submit the following using the link below: a detailed cover letter addressing how your experience matches the qualifications; a statement of philosophy describing your vision of the position and how your skills will fit the larger context of the Marriott Library and the University of Utah; curriculum vitae; and names and contact information, including email, mail and phone number of four references.
http://utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/21422
The University of Utah is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and educator. Minorities, women, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply. Veterans preference. Reasonable accommodations provided. For additional information see http://www.regulations.utah.edu/humanResources/5-106.html
The University of Utah values candidates who have experience working in settings with students from diverse backgrounds and who possess a strong commitment to improving access to higher education for historically underrepresented students.
The Search Committee
Sylvia Torti, Dean of the Honors College, Co-Chair
Catherine Soehner, Associate Dean for Research and Learning Services, Marriott Library, Co-Chair
Denise Dearing, Associate Dean, College of Science
Tony Ekdale, Professor, Geology & Geophysics
TJ Ferrill, Marriott Library, Manager of CMS Outer Labs.
Mike Freeman, Director of Libraries, Utah Valley University and Member from Academic Library Consortium
Greg Hatch, Marriott Library, Head of Fine Arts, incoming Library Faculty Chair
Jerilyn McIntyre, UofU Interim President Emerita and Co-Chair Elect, Marriott Library Advisory Board
Allyson Mower, Marriott Library, Librarian, Scholarly Communications and Copyright and incoming Academic Senate President
Karren Nichols (committee secretary), Marriott Library, Administrative & Sustainability Coordinator
Alison Regan, Marriott Library, Librarian, Head Scholarship and Education Services
Jean Shipman, Director, Eccles Medical Library Cory Stokes, Director, Teaching and Learning Technologies
Geneva Thompson, ASUU President
Octavio Villalpando, Associate Vice President for Equity and Diversity, Ex-Officio
